The neural substrate of noun morphological inflection: A rapid event-related fMRI study in Italian

Russo, Andrea G.; Esposito, Fabrizio; Laudanna, Alessandro; Mancuso, Azzurra; Salle, Francesco Di; Elia, Annibale; Martino, Maria De

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107699

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…Our results are consistent with psycholinguistic studies that have highlighted processing modulation to the distributional properties of Italian nouns and have reported slower and less accurate responses to noun forms opaque with respect to gender (Caffarra et al, 2015;De Martino et al, 2011. Mismatches between declensional class and gender value have been proven costly in processing terms and, in particular, fMRI data showed increased cortical activity for an extensive network (involving frontal and temporal areas, cingulate cortex and cerebellum) linked to inflectional operations for Italian non-transparent declensional classes (Russo et al, 2021). We expect our results to provide a better estimate of Italian nouns' transparency for future neuro-and psycholinguistic studies on inflection.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

“…In line with this account, transparency does appear to facilitate the acquisition of inflectional features, as shown in a recent study with Bulgarianand Russian-speaking children on the acquisition of gender cues (Ivanova-Sullivan and Sekerina, 2019). Unsurprisingly, a facilitation in the processing of grammatical gender information when the relation between ending and value is transparent or regular has been observed in a wealth of studies, comprising behavioral paradigms (e.g., Bates et al, 1995Bates et al, , 1996De Martino et al, 2011;Gollan and Frost, 2001;Taft and Meunier, 1998), electrophysiological (e.g., Caffarra et al, 2015) and neural evidence (e.g., Miceli et al, 2002;Russo et al, 2021) including aphasiological studies (Franzon et al, 2013;Luzzatti and De Bleser, 1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Form and function: a study on the distribution of the inflectional endings in Italian nouns and adjectives.

Pescuma¹,

Zanini²,

Crepaldi³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Inflectional values, such as singular and plural, sustain agreement relations between constituents in sentences, allowing sentence parsing and prediction in online processing.Ideally, these processes would be facilitated by a consistent and transparent correspondence between the inflectional values and their form: for example, the value of plural should always be expressed by the same ending, and that ending should only express plural.Experimental research reports higher processing costs in presence of a non-transparent relation between endings and values. While this effect was found in several languages, and typological research shows that consistency is far from common in morphological paradigms, it is still somewhat difficult to precisely quantify the degree of transparency of inflected forms.Furthermore, to date, no accounts have quantified the extent to which transparency in inflection is expressed across different parts of speech, depending on whether these act as controllers of the agreement (e.g., nouns) or as targets (e.g., adjectives), and how it relates to the declensional classes.We present a case study on Italian, a language that marks gender and number features in nouns and adjectives. This work provides measures of the distribution of forms in the noun and adjective inflection in Italian, quantifies the degree of form-value transparency with respect to inflectional endings and declensional classes. In order to obtain these measures, we built Flex It, a dedicated large-scale database of inflectional morphology of Italian, and made it available, in order to sustain further theoretical and empirical and research.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Form and function: a study on the distribution of the inflectional endings in Italian nouns and adjectives.

Pescuma¹,

Zanini²,

Crepaldi³

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Our results are also consistent with psycholinguistic studies that have related effects on processing to the distributional properties of Italian nouns, reporting slower and less accurate responses to noun forms opaque with respect to gender (De Martino et al, 2011Martino et al, , 2017Caffarra et al, 2015). Mismatches between declensional class and gender value have been proven costly in processing terms and, in particular, fMRI data showed increased cortical activity for an extensive network (involving frontal and temporal areas, cingulate cortex and cerebellum) linked to inflectional operations for Italian non-transparent declensional classes (Russo et al, 2021). We expect our results to provide a better estimate of Italian nouns' transparency for future neuro-and psycholinguistic studies on inflection.…”

Section: Pending Issues and Conclusionsupporting

confidence: 84%

“…Similarly, it has been noted that, in sentence comprehension, speakers of morphologically rich languages (like Italian or German) are more likely to use inflectional cues than speakers of languages having highly constrained word order (like English; Bates et al, 1982;MacWhinney et al, 1984;MacWhinney and Bates, 1989) and that in second language acquisition less proficient speakers are more likely to rely on ending cues than more proficient speakers and, as a result, are faster and more accurate in retrieving the gender of nouns whose endings transparently convey the corresponding morphological value (e.g., for German-English bilinguals: Bordag et al, 2006; for Basque-Spanish bilinguals: Caffarra et al, 2017). Unsurprisingly, a facilitation in the processing of grammatical gender information when the relation between ending and value is transparent or regular has been observed in a wealth of studies, comprising behavioral paradigms (e.g., Bates et al, 1995Bates et al, , 1996Taft and Meunier, 1998;Gollan and Frost, 2001;De Martino et al, 2011), electrophysiological (e.g., Caffarra et al, 2015) and neural evidence (e.g., Miceli et al, 2002;Russo et al, 2021), including studies on aphasia and semantic dementia (Luzzatti and De Bleser, 1996;Lambon Ralph et al, 2011;Franzon et al, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Form and Function: A Study on the Distribution of the Inflectional Endings in Italian Nouns and Adjectives

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Inflectional values, such as singular and plural, sustain agreement relations between constituents in sentences, allowing sentence parsing and prediction in online processing. Ideally, these processes would be facilitated by a consistent and transparent correspondence between the inflectional values and their form: for example, the value of plural should always be expressed by the same ending, and that ending should only express plural. Experimental research reports higher processing costs in the presence of a non-transparent relation between forms and values. While this effect was found in several languages, and typological research shows that consistency is far from common in morphological paradigms, it is still somewhat difficult to precisely quantify the transparency degree of the inflected forms. Furthermore, to date, no accounts have quantified the transparency in inflection with regard to the declensional classes and the extent to which it is expressed across different parts of speech, depending on whether these act as controllers of the agreement (e.g., nouns) or as targets (e.g., adjectives). We present a case study on Italian, a language that marks gender and number features in nouns and adjectives. This work provides measures of the distribution of forms in the noun and adjective inflection in Italian, and quantifies the degree of form-value transparency with respect to inflectional endings and declensional classes. In order to obtain these measures, we built Flex It, a dedicated large-scale database of inflectional morphology of Italian, and made it available, in order to sustain further theoretical and empirical research.

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“…Although few studies have addressed the influence of verb regularity on language production, irregular verbs have been reported to be more prone to errors in children with a developmental language disorder [ 47 ] and children have been shown to be sensitive to verb regularity during language acquisition [ 48 , 49 ]. Further, the cerebellar involvement in noun regularity has recently been described [ 50 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterising the Long-Term Language Impairments of Children Following Cerebellar Tumour Surgery by Extracting Psycholinguistic Properties from Spontaneous Language

Svaldi,

Paquier,

Keulen

et al. 2023

Cerebellum

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Following cerebellar tumour surgery, children may suffer impairments of spontaneous language. Yet, the language processing deficits underlying these impairments are poorly understood. This study is the first to try to identify these deficits for four levels of language processing in cerebellar tumour survivors. The spontaneous language of twelve patients who underwent cerebellar tumour surgery (age range 3–24 years) was compared against his or her controls using individual case statistics. A distinction was made between patients who experienced postoperative cerebellar mutism syndrome (pCMS) and those who did not. Time since surgery ranged between 11 months and 12;3 years. In order to identify the impaired language processing levels at each processing level (i.e., lexical, semantic, phonological and/or morphosyntactic) nouns and verbs produced in the spontaneous language samples were rated for psycholinguistic variables (e.g., concreteness). Standard spontaneous language measures (e.g., type-token ratio) were calculated as well. First, inter-individual heterogeneity was observed in the spontaneous language outcomes in both groups. Nine out of twelve patients showed language processing deficits three of whom were diagnosed with pCMS. Results implied impairments across all levels of language processing. In the pCMS-group, the impairments observed were predominantly morphosyntactic and semantic, but the variability in nature of the spontaneous language impairments was larger in the non-pCMS-group. Patients treated with cerebellar tumour surgery may show long-term spontaneous language impairments irrespective of a previous pCMS diagnosis. Individualised and comprehensive postoperative language assessments seem necessary, given the inter-individual heterogeneity in the language outcomes.

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The neural substrate of noun morphological inflection: A rapid event-related fMRI study in Italian

Cited by 7 publications

References 76 publications

Form and function: a study on the distribution of the inflectional endings in Italian nouns and adjectives.

Form and function: a study on the distribution of the inflectional endings in Italian nouns and adjectives.

Form and Function: A Study on the Distribution of the Inflectional Endings in Italian Nouns and Adjectives

Characterising the Long-Term Language Impairments of Children Following Cerebellar Tumour Surgery by Extracting Psycholinguistic Properties from Spontaneous Language

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