Previous studies have compared Covid metaphors across languages and national contexts, but seldom focus on the translation issue where news narratives of the same event may be different when translated for different readers. Another unexplored question is whether, and how, successive discursive observations across time in such narratives are related. To fill these gaps, this study employs the Box-Jenkins time series analysis (TSA) method to investigate whether and how WAR metaphor usage in Chinese-English COVID-19 news reports (source articles and their translations) can be fitted with ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) models. These reports come from three different sources across the year 2020: the Chinese (GT), the American (NYT) and the British (TE). Results show that WAR metaphors in the source news of GT and TE are modelable with an autoregressive and moving average model. However, no models were found to fit their translation counterparts. By contrast, WAR metaphors in both NYT's source and translated news were not modelable. These differences are further qualitatively analyzed with examples in context. The study may contribute to the existing debates on WAR frames in COVID-19 discourse by adding a translation and TSA angle.

This study contributes to the understanding of bilingual speech sound acquisition, as it explores substitution patterns by preschoolers undergoing a language shift. Specifically, it investigates the distribution of glides [j w] as substituted sounds for rhotics and laterals sounds in English and Spanish. Spanish glides [j] and [w] share acoustic and phonological features with the high vowels [i] and [u], whereas English includes both glides in the consonant inventory. In English, the substitution pattern of gliding ([w]abbit) is frequently found in preschoolers, but it does not occur in monolingual Spanish-speaking children. Gliding was studied in Spanish-English bilingual and monolingual English-speaking children born and raised in a southwest border region of the U.S. Single word outputs of 61 typically-developing children were analyzed. Twenty-two (36%) exhibited gliding (11 bilingual children and 11 monolingual children). Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, this study shows evidence of distributed phonological systems and between-language interactions (Paradis, 2001). Gliding was found to occur significantly more often in English monolingual than Spanish-English bilingual children. Additionally, cross-linguistic effects were found in the Spanish data. These results indicate that maintenance of the minority language at home bootstraps the acquisition of English rhotics for these bilingual Spanish-English preschoolers in the borderlands.

To cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, various policy measures accompanied by health crisis communication were adopted in China to engage publics. In this study, we investigated how communicated COVID-19 messages on Weibo. Drawing on the Appraisal Framework, we developed a three-stage mixed method approach to study 400 COVID-19 posts to identify the attitude resources employed and their association with public engagement. We found that attitudinal posts were more engaging than non-attitudinal posts. Judgment, both positive and negative, was positively associated with public engagement, whereas the use of positive Affect and Appreciation could be ineffective. These findings contribute to the understanding of how public engagement on social media can be enhanced through the use of attitudinal messages in health emergencies.

Languages differ in how they express motion: Languages like English prefer to conflate manner and path into the same clause and express both elements frequently while languages like Turkish prefer to express these elements separately, with a greater preference for the expression of path of motion. While typological patterns are well-established for monolingual speakers of a variety of languages, relatively less is known about motion expression in bilingual speakers. The current study examined the packaging (expressing each element in separate clauses or within the same clause) and lexical choices (amount and diversity of manner and path verbs) for motion expression in monolingual speakers of Turkish or English and advanced Turkish (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals in a narrative elicitation task. Bilinguals were successful in attaining many English-like patterns of expression in their L2 English but also showed some packaging and lexical choices that were intermediate between English and Turkish monolinguals-thus providing evidence of an L1-to-L2 cross-linguistic effect. Subtle effects of L2 on L1 were also found in bilinguals' lexical choices for the expression of motion in their L1 Turkish. Altogether, our results demonstrate bi-directional transfer effects of learning a typologically distinct language in advanced Turkish-English bilinguals.

Two experiments examined the relation between event structure, situational likelihood and eye fixation time while reading predicate modifiers in isolated sentences. Experiment 1 used activity predicates and preparatory process predicates (), which make salient the process that leads to a culmination. Preparatory process predicates increased first pass time on durative modifiers () and decreased total time on frequency modifiers (e.g., ). Situational likelihood was associated with fixation times on frame modifiers () but not with fixation times on durative or frequency modifiers. Experiment 2 used activity predicates and result state predicates (), which make salient the result that follows from a culmination. Result state predicates had no effect on fixation times on durative modifiers and decreased total time on frequency modifiers. Situational likelihood was associated only with total time on durative modifiers. These results demonstrate that readers use the meanings of predicates and modifiers to form an initial model of a sentence and that the likelihood of the reported situation is related to reading time relatively late. The results are discussed in terms of type coercion theory and situation models in sentences and narratives.

Discussions of reference tracking in spoken languages often invoke some version of a referential hierarchy. In this paper, we asked whether this hierarchy applies equally well to reference tracking in a visual language, American Sign Language, or whether modality differences influence its structure. Expanding the results of previous studies, this study looked at ASL referential devices beyond nouns, pronouns, and zero anaphora. We elicited four simple narratives from eight native ASL signers, and examined how the signers tracked reference throughout their stories. We found that ASL signers follow general principles of the referential hierarchy proposed for spoken languages by using nouns for referent introductions, and zero anaphora for referent maintenance. However, we also found significant differences such as the absence of pronouns in the narratives, despite their existence in ASL, and differential use of verbal and constructed action zero anaphora. Moreover, we found that native signers' use of classifiers varied with discourse status in a way that deviated from our expectations derived from the referential hierarchy for spoken languages. On this basis, we propose a tentative hierarchy of referential expressions for ASL that incorporates modality specific referential devices.

This paper investigates a proposed phonetically-based account of developmental phonological patterns that lack counterparts in adult typology. Adult listeners perceive some phonemic contrasts more accurately than others, and these differences in perceptual recoverability are posited to represent one influence on phonological typology. One hypothesis suggests that children and adults could differ in their patterns of relative perceptual sensitivity, and these differences could form the basis for some child-specific phonological patterns in production. However, there has been a lack of empirical evidence to support this claim. This study used a nonword discrimination task to investigate differences in perceptual recoverability across contrasts and contexts in typically-developing preschool children. Participants heard nonwords that were identical or differed by a single segment in initial or final position. Results revealed general agreement between child and adult listeners in the relative discriminability of different featural contrasts. For certain contrasts, discrimination accuracy was significantly greater in initial than final position, mirroring an asymmetry seen in adults. Overall, these results suggest that perceptual discrimination in preschool-aged children is broadly congruent with patterns of relative sensitivity observed in adult listeners. These findings suggest that factors other than perceptual recoverability should be explored to account for child-specific phonological patterns.

How do we know when a contrast is coming? This study explores the prediction of parallel contrastive phrases, especially NPs, in sentences with and without overt focus marking. A written sentence-completion questionnaire with clauses followed by the conjunction "but" compared unmarked initial clauses to ones with the focus marker "only" on the subject or object. Both conditions with "only" elicited more contrasts overall than the condition without focus marking, and many of the contrasts were with the focus-marked NP. While the baseline (no-only) condition had full clauses for half of the completions, subject focus increased clausal completions and object focus increased negative ellipsis completions ("not"+NP structures), both changes in syntax which make a contrast with the marked NP easy. The production of negative ellipsis sentences primarily in the object-focus condition suggests that the object bias of these sentences in comprehension could relate to their being used more frequently with this meaning. Finally, the overall pattern of results shows that overt marking of contrastive focus increases continuations with contrasts, and the conjunction "but" does not reliably predict explicitly-stated contrasts within a sentence without overt focus marking.

Current models of speech perception tend to emphasize either fine-grained acoustic properties or coarse-grained abstract characteristics of speech sounds. We argue for a particular kind of 'sparse' vowel representations and provide new evidence that these representations account for the successful access of the corresponding categories. In an auditory semantic priming experiment, American English listeners made lexical decisions on targets (e.g. ) preceded by semantically related primes (e.g. ). Changes of the prime vowel that crossed a vowel-category boundary (e.g. ) were not treated as a tolerable variation, as assessed by a lack of priming, although the phonetic categories of the two different vowels considerably overlap in American English. Compared to the outcome of the same experiment with New Zealand English listeners, where such prime variations tolerated, our experiment supports the view that phonological representations are important in guiding the mapping process from the acoustic signal to an abstract mental representation. Our findings are discussed with regard to current models of speech perception and recent findings from brain imaging research.

The advent of cochlear implantation has provided thousands of deaf infants and children access to speech and the opportunity to learn spoken language. Whether or not deaf infants successfully learn spoken language after implantation may depend in part on the extent to which they listen to speech rather than just hear it. We explore this question by examining the role that attention to speech plays in early language development according to a prominent model of infant speech perception - Jusczyk's WRAPSA model - and by reviewing the kinds of speech input that maintains normal-hearing infants' attention. We then review recent findings suggesting that cochlear-implanted infants' attention to speech is reduced compared to normal-hearing infants and that speech input to these infants differs from input to infants with normal hearing. Finally, we discuss possible roles attention to speech may play on deaf children's language acquisition after cochlear implantation in light of these findings and predictions from Jusczyk's WRAPSA model.

This paper examines a range of predicted versus attested error patterns involving coronal fricatives (e.g. [s, z, θ, ð]) as targets and repairs in the early sound systems of monolingual English-acquiring children. Typological results are reported from a cross-sectional study of 234 children with phonological delays (ages 3 years; 0 months to 7;9). Our analyses revealed different instantiations of a putative developmental conspiracy within and across children. Supplemental longitudinal evidence is also presented that replicates the cross-sectional results, offering further insight into the life-cycle of the conspiracy. Several of the observed typological anomalies are argued to follow from a modified version of Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (McCarthy, 2007).

The relation between prosody and syntax is investigated here by tracing the emergence of each in a new language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. We analyze the structure of narratives of four signers of this language: two older second generation signers, and two about 15 years younger. We find that younger signers produce prosodic cues to dependency between semantically related constituents, e.g., the two clauses of conditionals, revealing a type and degree of complexity in their language that is not frequent in that of the older pair. In these younger signers, several rhythmic and (facial) intonational cues are aligned at constituent boundaries, indicating the emergence of a grammatical system. There are no overt syntactic markers (such as complementizers) to relate clauses; prosody is the only clue. But this prosodic complexity is matched by syntactic complexity inside propositions in the younger signers, who are more likely to use pronouns as abstract grammatical markers of arguments, and to combine predicates with their arguments within in a constituent. As the prosodic means emerge for identifying constituent types and signaling dependency relations between them, the constituents themselves become increasingly complex. Finally, our study shows that the emergence of grammatical complexity is gradual.

This study examines the proposal that the syntax-discourse interface is particularly vulnerable, and therefore components of this interface are acquired later than those of the syntax-semantics interface. The proposal is examined using data from the native language acquisition of markers of point of view in American Sign Language and Brazilian Sign Language, known as constructed action (CA). CA was observed in the spontaneous production of two case studies from as early as 1 year, 7 months of age, with the correct eye-gaze, facial expression, and manner of movement. However, the children sometimes failed to indicate the referent whose point of view was being expressed, and were not skilled at maintaining point of view marking across discourse. The results are interpreted as providing support for the vulnerability of the syntax-discourse interface, and for the interpretation of this vulnerability in connection with children's relatively poor ability to assume an identical discourse context with their interlocutor.

This paper tests claims that children with Grammatical(G)-SLI are impaired in hierarchical structural dependencies at the clause level and in whatever underlies such dependencies with respect to movement, chain formation and feature checking; that is, their impairment lies in the syntactic computational system itself (the Computational Grammatical Complexity hypothesis proposed by van der Lely in previous work). We use a grammaticality judgement task to test whether G-SLI children's errors in wh-questions are due to the hypothesised impairment in syntactic dependencies at the clause level or lie in more general processes outside the syntactic system, such as working memory capacity. We compare the performance of 14 G-SLI children (aged 10-17 years) with that of 36 younger language-matched controls (aged 5-8 years). We presented matrix wh-subject and object questions balanced for wh-words (who/what/which) that were grammatical, ungrammatical, or semantically inappropriate. Ungrammatical questions contained wh-trace or T-to-C dependency violations that G-SLI children had previously produced in elicitation tasks. G-SLI children, like their language controls, correctly accepted grammatical questions, but rejected semantically inappropriate ones. However, they were significantly impaired in rejecting wh-trace and T-to-C dependency violations. The findings provide further support for the CGC hypothesis that G-SLI children have a core deficit in the computational system itself that affects syntactic dependencies at the clause level.

The paper presents a feature-checking theory of wh-movement that attempts to accommodate both adult grammar and the path of acquisition by which children handle long distance movement, indirect questions and partial movement. Partial movement is not a grammatical option in English but it is adopted as an option in development. The account makes several predictions about the performance of children with Specific Language impairment (SLI), and also predicts a particular advantage for children who speak African American English (AAE) over those who speak Mainstream American English (MAE). The empirical data are taken from a study of 590 children, both typically-developing and language-impaired, and both AAE and MAE speaking, aged four to nine years. The tasks involved answering wh-questions after stories as part of the field-testing of a new language assessment instrument. The questions included multi-clause questions with or without medial wh-complementizers. The predictions are borne out that children with language impairment have prolonged difficulty with real long distance movement and medial questions, and that children who speak AAE are at an advantage in avoiding certain errors (partial movement) because of the dialect's characteristic marking of indirect questions via inversion in the lower clause.

Using sign language research as an example, we argue that both the cross-linguistic descriptive approach to data, advocated by Evans and Levinson (2009), as well as abstract ('formal') analyses are necessary steps towards the development of "neurolinguistic primitives" for investigating how human languages are instantiated in the brain.

Evidence from sign language strongly supports three positions: (1) language is a coherent system with universal properties; (2) sign languages diverge from spoken languages in some aspects of their structure; and (3) domain-external factors can be identified that account for some crucial aspects of language structure -- uniform and diverse -- in both modalities. Assuming that any of these positions excludes the others defeats the purpose of the enterprise.

The Relativized Minimality approach to A'-dependencies (Friedmann et al., 2009) predicts that headed object relative clauses (RCs) and which-questions are the most difficult, due to the presence of a lexical restriction on both the subject and the object DP which creates intervention. We investigated comprehension of center-embedded headed object RCs with Italian children, where Number and Gender feature values on subject and object DPs are manipulated. We found that, Number conditions are always more accurate than Gender ones, showing that intervention is sensitive to DP-internal structure. We propose a finer definition of the lexical restriction where external and syntactically active features (such as Number) reduce intervention whereas internal and (possibly) lexicalized features (such as Gender) do so to a lesser extent. Our results are also compatible with a memory interference approach in which the human parser is sensitive to highly specific properties of the linguistic input, such as the cue-based model (Van Dyke, 2007).

Prosody has a large impact on language processing. We contrast two views of how prosody and intonation might exert their effects. On a 'prosodic packaging' approach, prosodic boundaries structure the linguistic input into perceptual and memory units, with the consequence that material in earlier packages is less accessible for linguistic processing than material in the current package. This approach claims that such lessened accessibility holds true for the comprehension of all constructions, regardless of the particular kind of linguistic dependency that needs to be established using the earlier constituent. A 'specialized role' approach, by contrast, attributes to prosodic boundaries a role in making grouping decisions when building hierarchical structure, but attributes to pitch accents the major role in determining the accessibility of a constituent. The results of four listening studies with replacive sentences (Diane thought Patrick was entertaining, not Louise) support the predictions of the specialized role hypothesis over the prosodic packaging approach.

The proposal is made that the interface between language and theory of mind is bidirectional. It seems probable that the conceptual developments of early Theory of Mind form an essential basis for helping to fix at least word reference. In development from two to four years, no basis exists in research for conclusions about the direction of influence between language and Theory of Mind. At the stage of false belief reasoning, after age four, the role of the mastery of syntactic complementation is highlighted as a representational tool, that is, language development assists reasoning. The paper presents a brief summary of Theory of Mind, ranging from its earliest beginnings in infancy to the appreciation around age four years that others might hold false beliefs and act according to them. For each development, the parallel language developments are described, and questions are raised about the interface between the two. In particular, research that might determine the direction of influence from one to the other is discussed. More work is called for, especially with nonverbal tasks, good experimental linguistic work, and other special populations, that might allow a more precise delineation of how language and Theory of Mind interrelate at the interface.

Three experiments examined 2.5-year-olds' sensitivity to discourse structure in pronoun interpretation. Children heard simple two-character stories illustrated by pictures on two video screens. In Experiments 1 and 2, one character in each story was established as more prominent than the other in several context sentences because it was mentioned first, appeared in subject position, was mentioned more often, and was pronominalized once. In Experiment 3, one character was singled out as more prominent only by being mentioned first and placed in subject position. In all three experiments, after hearing a pronoun subject in the final (test) sentence of each story, children looked longer at the character established as more prominent in the preceding sentences. These experiments show that 2.5-year-olds, like older children and adults, interpret pronouns relative to a discourse representation in which referents are ranked in prominence, and that the prominence of discourse referents is influenced by some of the same factors that guide pronoun interpretation in adulthood.