PSYCHOLINGUISTICS: A CROSS-LANGUAGE PERSPECTIVE
                       Elizabeth Bates
                   University of California, San Diego
                      Antonella Devescovi
                    University of Rome 'La Sapienza'
                       Beverly Wulfeck
             San Diego State University and University of California, San Diego
                    Technical Report CRL-0009
                        May 2000
                  Center for Research in Language
                  University of California, San Diego
                     La Jolla, CA 92093-0526
        Annual Review of Psychology, 2001, 52, 369-396
             PSYCHOLINGUISTICS: A CROSS-LANGUAGE PERSPECTIVE
                                Elizabeth Bates
                           University of California, San Diego
                               Antonella Devescovi
                           University of Rome 'La Sapienza'
                                Beverly Wulfeck
                  San Diego State University and University of California, San Diego
         Support was provided by “Cross-linguistic studies of aphasia” (DC00216), “Center for the
         Study of the Neural Bases of Language & Learning” (NS22343), “Origins of
         Communication Disorders” (DC01289).  Thanks to Meiti Opie for assistance in manuscript
         preparation.  Please address all correspondence to Elizabeth Bates, Center for Research in
         Language, Dept. 0526, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093
         (bates@crl.ucsd.edu).   
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                                     PSYCHOLINGUISTICS: A CROSS-LANGUAGE PERSPECTIVE
                                                   Elizabeth Bates, Antonella Devescovi, and Beverly Wulfeck
                                                                               ABSTRACT
                          Cross-linguistic studies are essential to the identification of universal processes in language development, language use and
                     language breakdown.  Comparative studies in all three areas are reviewed, demonstrating powerful differences across languages
                     in the order in which specific structures are acquired by children, the sparing and impairment of those structures in aphasic
                     patients, and the structures that normal adults rely upon most heavily in real-time word and sentence processing.  It is proposed
                     that these differences reflect a cost-benefit trade-off among universal mechanisms for learning and processing (perception,
                     attention, motor planning, memory) that are critical for language, but are not unique to language.
                          The purpose of psycholinguistic research is to                 ized in Slobin’s 5-volume work, The cross-linguistic
                     uncover universal processes that govern the develop-                study of language acquisition (Slobin 1985-1997), most
                     ment, use and breakdown of language.  However, to the               of them emphasizing the analysis of free speech (see
                     extent that research in a given subfield of psycholin-              also Sokolov & Snow 1994, and virtually any volume
                     guistics is dominated by English, we cannot distinguish             of Journal of Child Language).  Case studies of speech
                     between universal mechanisms and English-specific                   production in agrammatic Broca’s aphasics in many
                     facts.  Below we will present a brief and selective                 different languages can be found in Menn and Obler
                     review of cross-linguistic research on language                     (1990).  An increasing number of descriptive and/or
                     development in children, language symptoms in brain-                experimental studies of aphasia in various languages
                     injured adults, and language processing in normal                   can be found in the journal Brain and Language.
                     adults, in an order that reflects the impact that cross-            Finally, studies of word and sentence processing in
                     language variations have had on theoretical frameworks              healthy adult native speakers of languages other than
                     within each field.                                                  English have increased in frequency in the last few
                          Cross-linguistic studies of monolinguals come in               years, including special issues devoted to the processing
                     two varieties.1    One approach treats language as a                of morphology (Sandra & Taft 1994), and grammatical
                     between-subjects variable, applying the same experi-                gender (Friederici et al. 1999).
                     mental design in two or more languages to determine                      Studies from both points of view will be
                     how theoretically relevant linguistic differences affect            considered here. But first, let us consider some concrete
                     performance.  Examples from child language include                  examples of structural contrasts with powerful
                     cross-linguistic comparisons of tense and aspect in                 implications for psycholinguistic theory, and use them
                     narratives (Berman & Slobin 1994), the use of “path                 to illustrate how cross-linguistic research can be used in
                     verbs” vs. “manner verbs” to describe an action-packed              the search for universal mechanisms.
                     cartoon (Slobin 1996), the acquisition of spatial loca-              Cross-Language Contrasts and their Relevance for
                     tives (Bowerman & Choi 1994), and differential use to                                        Processing
                     word order, semantics and grammatical morphology to                      We assume that psycholinguistic universals do
                     assign agent-object relations in a “Who did the action?”            exist.  Languages like English, Italian and Chinese draw
                     task (Bates et al., 1999; Devescovi et al., 1998, Mac-              on the same mental/neural machinery.  They do not
                     Whinney & Bates 1989, Slobin & Bever 1982).  Studies                “live” in different parts of the brain, and children do not
                     of aphasia from this perspective are summarized in                  differ in the mechanisms required to learn each one.
                     Bates et al. (1991b).  Studies of word and sentence                 However, languages can differ (sometimes quite drama-
                     processing in normal adults that treat language as a                tically) in the way this mental/neural substrate is taxed
                     between-subjects variable are reviewed in MacWhinney                or configured, making differential use of the same basic
                     & Bates (1989) and Hillert (1998).                                  mechanisms for perceptual processing, encoding and
                          A second approach treats languages as experiments              retrieval, working memory, and planning.  It is of
                     of nature, exploiting particular properties of a single             course well known that languages can vary quali-
                     target language to ask questions that could not be                  tatively, in the presence/absence of specific linguistic
                     answered in (for example) English.  A host of child                 features (e.g. Chinese has lexical tone, Russian has
                     language studies from this point of view are summar-                nominal case markers, English has neither).  In
                                                                                         addition, languages can vary quantitatively, in the
                     1Because of length limitations, this review is restricted           challenge posed by equivalent structures (lexical,
                     entirely to research on monolinguals.  However, the literatures     phonological, grammatical) for learning and/or real-
                     on bilingual development, bilingual aphasia, and processing         time use.  For example, passives are rare in English, but
                     in bilingual adults are certainly relevant to basic science in      extremely common in Sesotho, and relative clause
                     psycholinguistics, especially those studies that treat the          constructions are more common in English than Italian.
                     contrast between a bilingual’s two languages as a within-           To the extent that frequency and recency facilitate
                     subjects variable.                                                  structural access, these differences should result in
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                   earlier acquisition and/or a processing advantage.  As         (it) eats Giovanni,” with the normal reading in which
                   we shall see later, this seems to be the case for passives     people eat pasta, not the other way around).  Because of
                   in Sesotho, and for relative clauses in Italian.               these contrasts, word order (e.g. Noun-Verb-Noun) is a
                        Holding frequency constant, equivalent lexical,           highly reliable cue to agent-object relations in English
                   phonological and/or grammatical structures can also            but a relatively poor cue in Italian.
                   vary in their reliability (“cue validity”) and proces-             In direct contrast with the situation for word order,
                   sibility (“cue cost”).  These two constructs figure            subject-verb agreement is a weak cue to agent-object
                   prominently in the Competition Model (Bates & Mac-             relations in English, but a powerful cue in Italian.  For
                   Whinney 1989, MacWhinney 1987), a theoretical                  example, English has only two contrasting inflected
                   framework developed explicitly for cross-linguistic            forms in the present indicative paradigm (singular: I
                   research on acquisition, processing and aphasia.  Like         EAT, YOU EAT, HE EATS; plural: WE EAT, YOU-
                   other interactive-activation or constraint-based theories,     ALL EAT, THEY EAT), compared with six in Italian
                   the Competition Model assumes parallel processing,             (singular: IO MANGIO, TU MANGI, LUI MANGIA;
                   with detailed and bidirectional interactions among             plural: NOI MANGIAMO, VOI MANGIATE, LORO
                   different information types.  Within this framework,           MANGIANO). Looking at the full verb paradigm,
                   cue validity refers to the information value of a given        Italian verbs can take up to 47 different forms, com-
                   phonological, lexical, morphological or syntactic form         pared with only five in English (e.g. EAT, EATING,
                   within a particular language, while cue cost refers to the     EATS, ATE, EATEN).  Such extensive verb marking
                   amount and type of processing associated with the              provides the listener with a rich source of information
                   activation and deployment of that form (e.g. per-              about “Who did what to whom” that is not available in
                   ceivability, salience, neighborhood density vs.                English.
                   structural uniqueness, demands on memory, demands                  In contrast with both English and Italian, Chinese
                   on speech planning and articulation).  These two               has no inflectional paradigms at all (e.g. no plural
                   principles co-determine the nature of linguistic               inflections on nouns or tense inflections on verbs). It
                   representations in a particular language and the nature        does have function words and particles to convey some
                   of the dynamic processes by which form and meaning             of the functions carried out by inflections in other
                   are activated and mapped onto each other in real time.         languages.  However, these particles come in a single
                   Linguistic information is represented as a broadly             unalterable form, are optional in all but a handful of
                   distributed network of probabilistic connections among         contexts, and most are homophones or near-homo-
                   linguistic forms and the meanings they typically               phones of the content words from which they were
                   express, as in other connectionist theories of language.       historically derived (e.g. past-tense particle “wan” also
                   Linguistic rules are treated as form-meaning and form-         means “to finish”).  Despite the absence of case or
                   form mappings that can vary in strength, in that the           agreement markers to indicate agent-object relations,
                   ‘“same” rule may be stronger in one language than it is        word order is flexible in Chinese, and both subject and
                   in another.  Within a given language, structures that are      object can be omitted.  As a result, a sentence literally
                   high in cue validity should be the ones that normal            translated as “Chicken eat” could mean “The chicken is
                   adults attend to and rely upon most in real-time               eating” or “Someone is eating the chicken.”  Because of
                   language processing, and they should also be acquired          all these factors, Chinese listeners have to make flexible
                   earlier by children and retained under stress by aphasic       and rapid use of many different sources of information
                   patients.  However, effects of cue validity may be             in sentence processing, including aspects of prosody,
                   reduced or amplified by variations in cue cost, especial-      semantics and pragmatics that are less important in
                   ly in young children and/or brain-injured patients             English or Italian.
                   whose processing costs are already very high.                      These contrasts have clear implications for sen-
                        To illustrate contrasts in cue validity, consider         tence-level processing (with effects that are discussed
                   some of the factors that influence sentence inter-             below), but they also interact with cross-linguistic
                   pretation (especially agent-object relations, or “Who          differences in word structure to affect lexical access.
                   did what to whom”) in English, Italian and Chinese.  In        This includes cross-language differences in lexical
                   English, subjects are obligatory in free-standing              ambiguity, and differences in lexical structure that
                   declarative sentences (including dummy subjects like           challenge the oft-cited distinction between words and
                   “it” in “It is raining”), and word order is preserved with     rules (Pinker, 1999).
                   a rigidity that is unusual among the world’s languages.            With regard to lexical ambiguity, the rich
                   By contrast, Italian is a “pro-drop” language in which it      inflectional morphology of Italian makes it relatively
                   is possible to omit the subject if it can be inferred from     easy to distinguish between nouns, verbs and other
                   the context, or from markings on the verb (e.g. the best       grammatical classes. In contrast, the sparse grammatical
                   translation of “It is raining” in Italian, is “Piove,” or      morphology of English means that nouns, verbs and
                   “Rains”).  Italian also permits extensive variation in         other word classes often sound alike, and must be
                   word order for pragmatic purposes (e.g. it is possible to      disambiguated by context (‘the comb’ vs. ‘to comb’), or
                   say “La lasagna (la) mangia Giovanni,” or “The lasagna         by   prosodic   cues   (‘to  record’ vs.  ‘the record’).   In
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