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Introduction
My current research combines theoretical linguistics and experimental methods from psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics to inquire into the neural representation and processing of language, with a strong focus on syntax and bilingualism.
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January 2006 - December 2011
Publications
Publications (93)
Agrammatic speakers of languages with overt grammatical case show impaired use of the morphological cues to establish theta-role relations in sentences presented in non-canonical word orders. We analysed the effect of word order on the sentence comprehension of aphasic speakers of Basque, an ergative, free word order and head-final (SOV) language....
Linguistic analysis claims that verb agreement is composed of distinct phi-features such as person and number. But are these different phi-features processed distinctly or simi-larly? In a sentence grammaticality task, we explored the electrophysiological responses of Basque speakers when processing subject-verb person and number phi-feature agreem...
This study examined word order preferences as a function of phrasal length in Basque. Basque is an OV language with flexible sentence word order and rich verb agreement. Contrary to the universal short-before-long preference predicted by availability models, Hawkins has argued that short-before-long orders are preferred in VO languages such as Engl...
Studies from many languages consistently report that subject relative clauses (SR) are easier to process than object relatives (OR). However, Hsiao and Gibson (2003) report an OR preference for Chinese, a finding that has been contested. Here we report faster OR versus SR processing in Basque, an ergative, head-final language with pre-nominal relat...
Most sentence production models consider how ease of access to semantic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic information affects choice of constituent structure. These considerations are drawn exclusively from studies that investigated nominative/accusative head-initial (VO) languages. We investigated whether these findings can be generalized to...
Strategies for attachment resolution in double-antecedent relative clauses have been widely studied since the late 1980s, when a seminal study by Cuetos and Michell revealed that the principles of Late Closure and Minimal Attachment were met in some languages but not in others. These principles predicted a universal preference for low attachment wh...
The present study investigated the role of phrasal prosody in speech segmentation in adult bilingual speakers of two languages with opposite basic word orders: Basque and Spanish (Object-Verb and Verb-Object, respectively). We created a structurally ambiguous artificial language (AL) that allowed two possible parses, mimicking the order characteris...
Comprehenders across languages tend to interpret role-ambiguous arguments as the subject or the agent of a sentence during parsing. However, the evidence for such a subject/agent preference rests on the comprehension of transitive, active-voice sentences where agents/ subjects canonically precede patients/objects. The evidence is thus potentially c...
A central aspect of human experience and communication is understanding events in terms of agent (“doer”) and patient (“undergoer” of action) roles. These event roles are rooted in general cognition and prominently encoded in language, with agents appearing as more salient and preferred over patients. An unresolved question is whether this preferen...
Experimental research on argument structure has reported mixed results regarding the processing of unaccusative and unergative predicates. Using eye tracking in the visual world paradigm, this study seeks to fill a gap in the literature by presenting new evidence of the processing distinction between agent and theme subjects. We considered two hypo...
Languages differ in how they mark the dependencies between verbs and arguments, e.g., by case. An eye tracking and EEG picture description study examined the influence of case marking on the time course of sentence planning in Basque and Swiss German. While German assigns an unmarked (nominative) case to subjects, Basque specifically marks agent ar...
Are non-native speakers able to process their second language in a native-like way? The present study used the Event-Related Potentials' (ERPs) method to address this issue by focusing (1) on agent vs. agentless intransitive sentences and (2) on person vs. number agreement morphology. For that purpose, native and high proficiency and early non-nati...
Can native competence be achieved in a second language? Here, we focus on the Language Distance Hypothesis that claims that early and proficient bilinguals can achieve native competence for grammatical properties shared by their two languages, whereas unshared grammatical properties pose a challenge for native-like syntactic processing. We present...
Evidence shows that second language (L2) processing depends on the Age of Acquisition (AoA), proficiency and differences between L1 and L2 grammar. Here we focus on the influence of the latter factor on L2 processing. To this end, we tested early (AoA = 3 years) and highly proficient Spanish-Basque and Basque-Spanish bilinguals by means of Event-Re...
In two artificial language learning experiments with four groups of highly proficient Basque-Spanish bilinguals and two groups of Spanish monolinguals, we examine the cues that allow adult listeners to parse new input into phrases. In addition, we investigate which factors lead bilinguals to switch between the segmentation strategies characteristic...
The Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH) has been extensively studied in linguistics, but, to date, it has not been tested by means of ERPs. The present study aimed to experimentally test the UH hypothesis in Basque and determine what the electrophysiological correlates are of the processing of unergative versus unaccusative predicates; it also aimed to in...
People with aphasia frequently have difficulties understanding semantically reversible sentences presented in derived word order. This impairment may be related to the inconsistent processing of morphological information, as well as to difficulties inhibiting the inverse interpretation of the sentence. Studies on bilingual aphasia may contribute to...
This study investigates the processing of long-distance syntactic dependencies by native speakers of Slovenian (L1) who are advanced learners of Italian as a second language (L2), compared with monolingual Italian speakers. Using a self-paced reading task, we compare sensitivity of the early-acquired L2 learners to syntactic anomalies in their L2 i...
Does first language (L1) word order affect the processing of non-canonical but grammatical syntactic structures in second language (L2) comprehension? In the present study, we test whether L1-Spanish speakers of L2-Basque process subject–verb–object (SVO) and object–verb–subject (OVS) non-canonical word order sentences of Basque in the same way as...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11fiTUM_xyjfNh3O_s2VY28QXRHpz9JML/view
Background: Comprehension of non-canonical sentences is frequently characterised by chance level performance in people with aphasia (PWA). Chance level performance has been interpreted as guessing, but online data does not support this rendering. It is still not clear whether the incorrect sentence processing is guided by the compensatory strategie...
Pronominal dependencies have been shown to be more resilient to attraction effects than subject-verb agreement. We use this phenomenon to investigate whether antecedent-clitic dependencies in Spanish are computed like agreement or like pronominal dependencies. In Experiment 1, an acceptability judgment self-paced reading task was used. Accuracy dat...
It is widely accepted that duration can be exploited as phonological phrase final lengthening in the segmentation of a novel language, i.e., in extracting discrete constituents from continuous speech. The use of final lengthening for segmentation and its facilitatory effect has been claimed to be universal. However, lengthening in the world languag...
How infant and adult humans learn languages and what this tells us about the various aspects of the language system is currently a central topic in linguistic research, one that more and more includes bilingualism and language attrition in its embrace. Despite the centrality of the problem of language acquisition for Generative Grammar, it is fair...
Linguistic analysis claims that verb agreement is composed of distinct phi-features such as person and number, but are these different phi-features processed distinctly or similarly? We used a sentence grammaticality task to explore the electrophysiological responses of Basque speakers when processing subject-verb person and number phi-feature agre...
In the present study, we investigate how early and late L2 learners process L2 grammatical traits that are either present or absent in their native language (L1). Thirteen early (AoA = 4 years old) and 13 late (AoA = 18 years old) Spanish learners of Basque performed a grammatical judgment task on auditory Basque sentences while their event-related...
El objetivo de este libro es proporcionar una visión actualizada de los estudios realizados sobre diversos fenómenos del ámbito de la sintaxis teórica en las últimas décadas. La obra pone, por tanto, especial énfasis en lo que serían "estados de la cuestión" sobre determinados fenómenos que implican el módulo sintáctico.
Los cambios en la teoría s...
How ease of access to semantic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic information affects constituent structure selection has been investigated exclusively in nominative/accusative head-initial (VO) languages. We investigated whether these findings can be generalized to ergative head-final (OV) languages like Basque. Using the structural priming pa...
The present investigation seeks to determine whether and under what circumstances can adult bilinguals deploy segmentation strategies characteristic of their two languages, or of their dominant language. To that end, we inquired whether the context language employed during the segmentation experiment (i.e., the language in which participants receiv...
Linguistic analysis claims that verb agreement is composed of distinct phi-features such as person and number. But are these different phi-features processed distinctly or similarly? In a sentence grammaticality task, we explored the electrophysiological responses of Basque speakers when processing subject-verb person and number phi-feature agreeme...
Event-related potential studies on second language processing reveal that L1/L2 differences are due either to proficiency, age of acquisition or grammatical differences between L1 and L2 (Kotz in Brain Lang 109(2-3):68-74, 2009). However, the relative impact of these and other factors in second language processing is still not well understood. Here...
We investigated the correlation between irregular verbs and frequency in Spanish by means of a corpus analysis. Results show that frequency and regularity can be taken as independent variables. In addition, frequency and length show very close relations. This pattern is difficult to fit in the Dual-Mechanism model (Pinker and Prince 1988; Pinker an...
This article presents EHME, the frequency dictionary of Basque structure, an online program
that enables researchers in psycholinguistics to extract word and nonword stimuli, based on a
broad range of statistics concerning the properties of Basque words. The database consists of
22.7 million tokens, and properties available include morphological...
La investigación experimental de las últimas décadas ha ido revelando aspectos de la naturaleza neurocognitiva de la sintaxis, algunos de los cuales se recogen y discuten en este capítulo. La selección de temas, resultados e interpretación de la evidencia se ha hecho teniendo en cuenta principalmente la perspectiva de la teoría lingüística, y por e...
Cover title. Thesis (Ph. D)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1990. Includes bibliographical references (p. 254-265). Photocopy.
One universal feature of human languages is the division between grammatical functors and content words. From a learnability point of view, functors might provide entry points or anchors into the syntactic structure of utterances due to their high frequency. Despite its potentially universal scope, this hypothesis has not yet been tested on typolog...
Reviews the major lines of research in sentence processing from the beginning of the cognitive science field to the present. Contains chapters by world-renowned scientists who explain the evolution of their research programmes.Includes a reprint of 'Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures'.
Contains guidance for using the book as a class text
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3639379/
http://mappingignorance.org/2013/06/06/chewing-on-thoughts-the-mind-and-the-body/
The present corpus study aimed to examine whether Basque (OV) resorts more often than Spanish (VO) to certain grammatical operations, in order to minimize the number of arguments to be processed before the verb. Ueno & Polinsky (2009) argue that VO/OV languages use certain grammatical resources with different frequencies in order to facilitate real...
This chapter discusses how certain aspects of linguistic form specific to a language belonging to an understudied type of languages (ergative languages) yield processing results and acquisition patterns that have hitherto rarely been reported from studies of a well-studied type of languages (nominative languages). Specifically, it discusses recent...
In this paper, we discuss some recent results from studies of word order (linearization) processing in Basque that show that despite the apparently unconstrained freedom the language displays in linearizing major phrasal constituents in the sentence, native speakers' processing strategies reveal a clear advantage favouring the linearization that di...
We compared the processing of verb-medial sentences in Basque. Syntactic analysis claims that all word orders other than SOV
are derived in this language; therefore, verb medial sentences are expected to show signs of syntactic displacement and be
equally complex to process. A self-paced reading task measured the processing time for each constituen...
Number attraction phenomenon in subject-verb agreement relations has been widely studied in language production and comprehension (e.g. Vigliocco & Hartsuiker, 2004). However, only two studies have explored the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying these effects, and they have reported N400 and P600 components associated to the number attraction...
Introduction: The number of a local noun included in a modifier to the subject head can interfere with the agreement process resulting in subject-verb number agreement "attraction errors" (Bock & Miller, 1991). Number attraction in subject-verb relations has been widely studied in language production (e.g., Franck, et al., 2006; Hartsuiker, et al.,...
In this study, we explore native and non-native syntactic processing, paying special attention to the language distance factor. To this end, we compared how native speakers of Basque and highly proficient non-native speakers of Basque who are native speakers of Spanish process certain core aspects of Basque syntax. Our results suggest that differen...
Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting Program: A supplement of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. p. 205. ISSN 1096-8857
In the present study, we examined whether there is a symmetrical masked translation priming effect for non-cognate words in a group of highly proficient (native-like) Basque-Spanish simultaneous bilinguals using event-related brain potentials. Participants were presented with a set of Spanish and Basque words that could be preceded by their repetit...
Do typological properties of language, such as agglutination (i.e., the morphological process of adding affixes to the lexeme of a word), have an impact on the development of visual word recognition? To answer this question, we carried out an experiment in which beginning, intermediate, and adult Basque readers (n = 32 each, average age = 7, 11, an...
After a brief introduction to ERP methods in the study of language, we report some recent results from a set of experiments investigating morphosy ntactic processing in Basque. First we report results from experiments that focus on word-order processing, with special attention to verb medial sentences, where subjects show
no preference for either S...
Several ERP studies on native versus non-native language processing have argued that the observed differences result either from the speakers' Age of Acquisition (AoA) or from the level of language proficiency attained, but the impact of these factors is still unclear. Some recent results suggest that the relative impact of AoA and proficiency on n...
This study aimed to investigate the role of language in calculation. Two populations were compared, one with a base-10 language, and another (Basque) in which number words are constructed by combining multiples of 20 and units or teens (e.g., "35" is said "twenty and fifteen"). Experiment 1 asked participants to verbally solve additions presented a...
In the present study, we examined morphological decomposition of Basque compound words in a series of masked priming lexical decision experiments. In Experiment 1, Basque compound words could be briefly preceded by other compounds that shared either the first or second constituent, or by unrelated noncompound words. Results showed a significant pri...
We examined the electrophysiological correlates of one of the most influential orthographic effects: the transposed-letter-masked priming effect. Transposed-letter nonword-word pairs ('jugde-judge'), as well as transposed-letter word-word pairs ('casual-causal') were included to investigate the influence of prime's lexicality in the transposed-lett...
In natural languages some syntactic structures are simpler than others. Syntactically complex structures require further computation that is not required by syntactically simple structures. In particular, canonical, basic word order represents the simplest sentence-structure. Natural languages have different canonical word orders, and they vary in...
In the process of reading compound words, those with high-frequency second constituents are recognized faster than the ones with low-frequency second constituents. However, the role of the first constituent still remains unclear. In the present study, the time course of the frequency effects for both constituents was assessed using Basque compound...
En este artículo, se presenta un panorama de los tratamientos que ha recibido, dentro del paradigma generativo, una cuestión fundamental en los estudios de lengua vasca, como es la ergatividad. Esta propiedad gramatical se manifiesta en una minoría de las lenguas del planeta, y plantea serias cuestiones en cuanto a la relevancia y naturaleza de las...
This paper presents a description of the main symptoms of agrammatism found in a corpus of spontaneous speech production of 59 Basque-speaking aphasic patients. The main symptoms relate to deficits in the production of inflectional morphology. From the standpoint of grammatical structure, the deficits involve the production of the syntactic categor...
This paper presents evidence for a configurational notion of head in inflectional morphology. Following Marantz (1984) and Baker (1985), it is assumed that inflectional morphology is distinct from derivational morphology and that it is generated in the mapping from D-structure to S-structure. It is then argued that there is no need for language par...
The theoretical generalization that no lexical material can occur between a Wh-element and a verb in any clause in Basque is challenged, and it is argued that case is not assigned structurally in the Basque language. The account demonstrates how a number of well documented properties of Basque may combine to produce this grammatical result, and an...
We compared the processing of verb-medial sentences in Basque. Syntactic analysis claims that all word orders other than SOV are derived in this language; therefore, verb medial sentences are expected to show signs of syntactic displacement and be equally complex to process. A self-paced reading task measured processing time for each constituent of...
Lan honetan, agramatismo izenaz ezagutzen den hizkuntz-sindromeak euskaraz ageri dituen sintoma nagusiak aurkezten ditugu, horiek hizkuntza-ren egitura orokorrarekin, eta bereziki euskararen egiturarekin eduki lezake-ten zerikusia azpimarratuz. Agramatismoa, burmuineko hizkuntz-eremuetan jasotako kalte baten ondorioz gertatu ohi den sindromea dugu;...
