Luigi Rizzi

The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery

Under current assumptions, the structural representation of a clause consists of three kinds of structural layers, each layer an instantiation of the X-bar schema: 1. The lexical layer, headed by the verb, the structural layer in which theta assignment takes place. 2. The inflectional layer, headed by functional heads corresponding to concrete or abstract morphological specifications on the verb, and responsible for the licensing of argumental features such as case and agreement. 3. The complementizer layer, typically headed by a free functional morpheme, and hosting topics and various operator-like elements such as interrogative and relative pronouns, focalized elements, etc. In the mid eighties, each layer was identified with a single X-bar projection (VP, IP, CP), but this assumption quickly turned out to be too simplistic. Under the impact of Pollock’s (1989) influential analysis of verb movement, IP dissolved into a series of functional projections, each corresponding to system (Agr, T, Asp,…). Kayne’s (1984) binary branching hypothesis naturally led to the postulation of multiple VP layers for multi-argument verbs, e.g. along the lines of Larson (1988) and much related work.

Aspects of grammatical development in young French children with SLI

This paper presents an exploratory study of the spontaneous production of 11 French children clinically diagnosed as specific language impaired (SLI). In a cross-sectional study of the children under and over 5 years of age, we investigate the production of finite and non-finite verbal forms, of sentences with overt and null subjects, and of pronominal clitics. A comparison between younger and older children with SLI highlights developmental patterns which parallel normal syntactic development in important respects, though at a slower pace. An area of difficulty which clearly persists for the older group involves the domain of pronominal complement clitics.

A person is not a number: Discourse involvement in subject–verb agreement computation

Agreement is a very important mechanism for language processing. Mainstream psycholinguistic research on subject-verb agreement processing has emphasized the purely formal and encapsulated nature of this phenomenon, positing an equivalent access to person and number features. However, person and number are intrinsically different, because person conveys extra-syntactic information concerning the participants in the speech act. To test the person-number dissociation hypothesis we investigated the neural correlates of subject-verb agreement in Spanish, using person and number violations. While number agreement violations produced a left-anterior negativity followed by a P600 with a posterior distribution, the negativity elicited by person anomalies had a centro-posterior maximum and was followed by a P600 effect that was frontally distributed in the early phase and posteriorly distributed in the late phase. These data reveal that the parser is differentially sensitive to the two features and that it deals with the two anomalies by adopting different strategies, due to the different levels of analysis affected by the person and number violations.

When persons disagree: An ERP study of Unagreement in Spanish

Agreement is one of the main devices used by languages to signal grammatical relations. In this study, we investigated the neurophysiological processing correlates of subject-verb agreement in Spanish using Unagreement, a phenomenon characterized by a person mismatch between subject and verb that nonetheless produces a grammatical pattern. Unagreement was compared to well-formed sentences with full agreement, and ill-formed sentences with a person mismatch. Compared to control sentences, Unagreement produced a left posterior negativity followed by a more central negativity; no P600 effect was observed. In contrast, person violations generated a negativity that was widely distributed over the scalp, followed by a P600 effect. These data suggest that the comprehension of qualitatively different agreement patterns, which could reflect the performance of different processing routines, recruits different neural generators.

Sentence syntax and content in the human temporal lobe: An fmri adaptation study in auditory and visual modalities

Priming effects have been well documented in behavioral psycholinguistics experiments: The processing of a word or a sentence is typically facilitated when it shares lexico-semantic or syntactic features with a previously encountered stimulus. Here, we used fMRI priming to investigate which brain areas show adaptation to the repetition of a sentences content or syntax. Participants read or listened to sentences organized in series which could or not share similar syntactic constructions and/or lexico-semantic content. The repetition of lexico-semantic content yielded adaptation in most of the temporal and frontal sentence processing network, both in the visual and the auditory modalities, even when the same lexico-semantic content was expressed using variable syntactic constructions. No fMRI adaptation effect was observed when the same syntactic construction was repeated. Yet behavioral priming was observed at both syntactic and semantic levels in a separate experiment where participants detected sentence endings. We discuss a number of possible explanations for the absence of syntactic priming in the fMRI experiments, including the possibility that the conglomerate of syntactic properties defining “a construction” is not an actual object assembled during parsing.

The acquisition of pronouns by French children: A parallel study of production and comprehension

This study examines syntactic and morphological aspects of the production and comprehension of pronouns by 99 typically developing French-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 6 years, 5 months. A fine structural analysis of subject, object, and reflexive clitics suggests that whereas the object clitic chain crosses the subject chain, the reflexive clitic chain is nested within it. We argue that this structural difference introduces differences in processing complexity, chain crossing being more complex than nesting. In support of this analysis, both production and comprehension experiments show that children have more difficulty with object than with reflexive clitics (with more omissions in production and more erroneous judgments in sentences involving Principle B in comprehension). Concerning the morphological aspect, French subject and object pronouns agree in gender with their referent. We report serious difficulties with pronoun gender both in production and comprehension in children around the age of 4 (with nearly 30% errors in production and chance level judgments in comprehension), which tend to disappear by age 6. The distribution of errors further suggests that the masculine gender is processed as the default value. These findings provide further insights into the relationship between comprehension and production in the acquisition process.

Normal and pathological development of subject–verb agreement in speech production: a study on French children

We report a study on the spoken production of subject–verb agreement in number by four age groups of normally developing children (between 5 and 8;5) and a group of 8 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI; between 5;4 and 9;4), all French speaking. The production of verb agreement was experimentally elicited by asking children to complete sentence preambles containing a head noun and a potentially attracting ‘local noun’. In contrast to previous studies that focused on attraction with local nouns within the subject constituent (postmodifiers), we also studied attraction with local nouns in structures that are not part of the subject constituent (interpolated adjuncts). In normally developing children, we report that (1) attraction effects appear from early on; (2) singular is produced as the default number until age 7 included; (3) more errors are produced with adjunct structures than with postmodifiers, but only from age 8;5 on. In contrast, even the older SLI children showed no attraction effect, a predominance of the singular as default, no effect of syntactic structure and, more generally, persistent high error rates. The turning point observed between 7 and 8;5 in normal children, characterized by a reduced error rate and a significant effect of syntactic structure, is interpreted as an index of the automatization of agreement. The syntactic structure effect is discussed in terms of the interplay of structural and working memory factors in the computation of long-distance relationships.

On the study of the language faculty: Results, developments, and perspectives

Abstract The study of the language faculty pursued within the tradition of generative grammar focuses on a natural object, the cognitive capacity that our species possesses for knowledge, acquisition, and use of natural languages. This line of research investigates a component of the human mind/brain, and is pursued within the federating framework of the cognitive neurosciences. Three major steps of this research trend are examined here: the modeling of the language faculty as a computational capacity, the study of language invariance and variation through parametric models, and the guidelines of the Minimalist program. After a presentation of the logic of the parametric approach to language variation, some properties of the micro-versus macro-comparative study of syntax are examined. The basic guidelines of the Minimalist program are illustrated, with special reference to the role of economy principles; some consequences of minimalist ideas for general issues such as innateness and task-specificity of the language faculty are discussed.

Task-dependency and structure-dependency in number interference effects in sentence comprehension

[This corrects the article on p. 349 in vol. 6, PMID: 25914652.].

Core linguistic computations: How are they expressed in the mind/brain?

Abstract Over the last half century, linguists have introduced very detailed formal models of language knowledge, acquisition and use, and have proposed refined typologies of the kinds of mental computations involved in language. These models, in turn, capture and systematize observations and ideas developed in centuries of rational reflections on language. It is in the mutual interest of both linguists and cognitive neuroscientists to bridge the gap between mind and brain in this domain, and make substantial progress in connecting abstract models of linguistic competence and performance, and the study of the neural implementation of the computing mechanisms. In this paper I would like to offer a concise tutorial on some core ideas and analytic devices introduced in formal linguistics to deal with linguistic computations and language variation, with special reference to parametric and minimalist models. Then, I would like to conclude by phrasing some questions that current ideas on mental linguistic computations raise for the brain sciences.