This study explores whether the ability to process grammatical evidentiality is compromised in older adults speaking Turkish and Korean, two languages that grammatically encode evidentiality. Building on previous research that suggests cognitive demands associated with language structures may reduce processing capacity in older adults, we conducted self-paced reading experiments using sentence contexts involving grammatical evidentials. We tested adult groups of young (N = 44, ages 19–27) and older (N = 37, ages 48–70) speakers of Korean and young (N = 31, ages 18–31) and older (N = 42, ages 50–85) speakers of Turkish. The results indicate that both language groups rated mismatched evidential verb forms as unacceptable, with Turkish speakers more likely to interpret mismatches as acceptable than Korean speakers. Notably, older Korean adults exhibited longer reading times (RTs) for direct evidential mismatches, while older Turkish adults showed longer RTs for indirect evidential verbs, suggesting age-related disruptions in processing. The findings only partially support the hypothesis that predicts grammatical processing differences in older compared to younger adults.

This study investigates whether and how interacting with ChatGPT may offer a context that supports perspective shifting and the development of cognitive flexibility, defined as the capacity to move between etic (outsider) and emic (insider) perspectives. Drawing on individual interviews with students enrolled in an advanced university-level Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) French course focused on marketing and advertising in France, this qualitative study examines students’ perspectives on their experiences using ChatGPT to conduct market research on French consumer needs and preferences. The analysis reveals that while students expressed concerns about the legitimacy, authenticity, and cultural positioning of AI-generated content, the interactive and conversational nature of the tool enabled some students to experiment with culturally unfamiliar roles, adopt emerging emic stances, and reflect on the limits of their interpretive frameworks. However, co-creative engagement or shared agency with ChatGPT was not automatic and depended on prompt design, tolerance for ambiguity, and the negotiation of subjective positioning. Rather than facilitating perspective transformation, ChatGPT-supported interactions appeared to foster more modest but meaningful shifts in interpretive positioning and dialectical thinking. The study points to prompt literacy as crucial for fostering more dynamic partnerships with ChatGPT and enabling students to explore alternative perspectives and roles in ways that support the development of intercultural competence in the L2 classroom.

The study examines the influence of bilingual experience, age and verbal working memory (WM) on the comprehension of passive voice by 116 typically developing (TD) and 65 autistic children aged 3 to 13, who were tested in their societal languages, German or French. Some children were mainly exposed to the societal language while some children were also exposed to other languages. We adopt a continuous approach to bilingual experience and operationalize it as a balance of cumulative exposure, measured through entropy scores. We found that the comprehension of passive voice improved with age in both groups, and higher verbal WM predicted better performance in autistic but not TD children. Although autistic children were less accurate than TD children, bilingual experience did not contribute to the differences between the two groups. These findings suggest that bilingualism has no detrimental effect on the comprehension of complex syntactic structures in autistic children.

This article introduces the phenomenon of discontinuous harmony, where the target and trigger of harmony are separated by intervening nonharmonizing words. We present a case study from Guébie (Kru; Côte d’Ivoire) in which particle verbs are split via focus movement. Despite appearing at opposite edges of the clause, the verb controls harmony on the particle without affecting the vowels of intervening material. While discontinuous harmony would appear to violate locality, we offer an analysis that involves local harmony followed by syntactic movement that separates the trigger and target. This analysis thus relies on a cyclic interleaving of syntactic and phonological operations, where syntactic information persists through phonological evaluation and is available to later cycles of syntax.

Australian languages have often been noted for their high rates of phonological uniformity cross-linguistically; investigations into the phonetics of these languages, however, have revealed rich phonetic variation below the phonological level. In the current study, the phonetic correlates of stress in thirteen Australian languages with fixed initial stress placement are investigated using corpus phonetics methods and based on archival field recordings of natural speech. Across these languages, a high f0 peak is a common correlate of initial stress, as has often been cited in the literature; increased vowel duration is similarly common. Effects of onset consonant or post-tonic consonant lengthening have been noted for many Australian languages and are sometimes found in this study, though the lengthening may only apply to one or two of stops, nasals, and glides.

A substantial body of research has demonstrated that, in French as in other gender-marked languages, masculine generic terms tend to induce a male bias in the readers’ mental representations of the person referred to. The current study investigates whether this bias extends to hybrid nouns, a particular class of nouns with a fixed grammatical gender that can refer to either a man or a woman (e.g. “une personne”, ‘aFEM personFEM’, or “un individu”, ‘anMASC individualMASC’). We used a sentence evaluation paradigm where participants had to judge the acceptability of a sentence describing a character of a specific gender, either male or female, following a context sentence containing a hybrid noun. The results revealed that masculine hybrid nouns yielded faster processing of male continuation sentences, with response times 130 ms shorter than for female continuations on average. In contrast, no such difference was observed for feminine hybrid nouns. These results point to an asymmetry in the processing of grammatical gender: while feminine hybrid forms do not influence gender representation, masculine hybrid forms tend to elicit a male bias.

We present results from a qualitative analysis illustrating how people handle criticism in a workplace environment, including both the production of and responses to criticism. Our data comes from responses provided by 80 participants in a written Discourse Completion Task (DCT) in French. In the scenarios, relative power (equal vs. hierarchical) and social distance (close vs. distant) were manipulated. Our analysis focuses on three recurrent patterns. First, we illustrate how criticism and replies to criticism are the product of several speech acts, in line with the concept of speech act set. Second, we argue that criticism and replies to criticism are both impacted by external and internal downgrading and upgrading strategies. Third, we give examples of how pronouns can be used to increase or decrease the level of politeness. Our findings provide new insights into the preferred linguistics strategies for criticizing and responding to criticism in French.

The current study investigated two heuristic processing strategies, the agent-first strategy and an animacy-based strategy, in visual world eye-tracking data as well as sentence final interpretations of wh-questions in adolescent L1 German learners of English in both their L1 and their L2. We observed differences between online and offline measures, as well as L1-L2 differences, both in the selection and the time course of application of the heuristics. In L1 German, heuristics were visible only in online data, and the dominant heuristic was animacy-based. In L2 English, the animacy-based heuristic was applied later and to a lesser degree than the agent-first heuristic. The results speak against a direct transfer of heuristic strategies from the L1 to the L2. Instead, we suggest that low-proficiency learners may not have the capacity to use several heuristics at once, and may thus prioritize the agent-first strategy due to its broad domain of application.

This study investigates how lexical, phrasal, and contrastive stress are acoustically realized in American English, focusing on whether men and women differ in how they use pitch, amplitude, and duration to convey stress. Thirty-six native speakers completed minimal-pair stress production tasks online. We analyzed the resulting speech using prosodic contour measures, Bayesian ANOVAs, mixed-effects regression, Random Forest Classification, and human coder judgments. Results show greater acoustic overlap between lexical and contrastive stress than between either of those and phrasal stress. Duration was the primary cue for phrasal stress, while lexical and contrastive stress relied more evenly on multiple cues. Gender-based differences were especially evident in contrastive stress, which, to our knowledge, has not previously been studied in relation to gender: women relied more on pitch, while men emphasized amplitude and duration. These findings highlight the multidimensional acoustic nature of stress realization and demonstrate the value of combining computational and perceptual approaches in prosody research.

The subregular hypothesis posits that all phonological markedness constraints can be described by some principled, learnable subclass of the regular languages. In this article, I classify a wide range of attested long-distance phonological markedness constraints, covering stress, harmony and tone, with focus on interactions of constraints over multiple tiers. To this end, connections are established between propositional logic over multiple tiers and algebraic properties of formal languages. These techniques allow for mechanical verification or refutation of membership in a class. Modelling the constraints and their induced patterns as formal languages, I demonstrate that the entire range lies within the propositional level, including Uyghur backness harmony and Karanga Shona tone, which have been presented as challenges to aspects of the subregular hypothesis.