Europe has a particular and unique setting. On one had it has a great language diversity, there are twenty four official languages and a dozen of minority languages largely used. On the other hand most of these languages belong to one of the indo-European language families (Roman, Germanic Slavic) and within these language families similarities at lexical and syntactic level can be observed. Wh...

Using Phylogenetic Algebraic Geometry, we analyze computationally the phylogenetic tree of subfamilies of the Indo-European language family, using data of syntactic structures. The two main sources of syntactic data are the SSWL database and Longobardi’s recent data of syntactic parameters. We compute phylogenetic invariants and likelihood functions for two sets of Germanic languages, a set of ...

For the study of historical language varieties, the sparsity of training data imposes immense problems on syntactic annotation and the development of NLP tools that automatize the process. In this paper, we explore strategies to compensate the lack of training data by including data from related varieties in a series of annotation projection experiments from English to four old Germanic languag...

This study addressed the debate on the primacy of syllable vs. segment (i.e., phoneme) as a functional unit of phonological encoding in syllabic languages by investigating both behavioral and neural responses of Dutch-Cantonese (DC) bilinguals in a color-object picture naming task. Specifically, we investigated whether DC bilinguals exhibit the phonemic processing strategy, evident in monolingu...

In this paper, we describe our generic approach for transferring part-of-speech annotations from a resourced language towards an etymologically closely related non-resourced language, without using any bilingual (i.e., parallel) data. We first induce a translation lexicon from monolingual corpora, based on cognate detection followed by cross-lingual contextual similarity. Second, POS informatio...

We will attempt to show how human performance limitations on various types of syntactic embedding constructions in Germanic languages can be modelled in a relational network linguistic framework. After arguing against centralized data stores such as pushdown stacks and queues, we will demonstrate how interconnections among levels of linguistic structure can account for many of the psycholinguis...

Christopher C. Heffner, Laura C. Dilley, J. Devin McAuley, and Mark A. Pitt Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA Department of Psych...