This paper used the Fédération International de Football Association (FIFA) world ranking points data to examine how linguistic heterogeneity has an impact on technology transfer from the most developed countries. The major findings are: (1) the learning effect from the most developed countries on team performance is larger for developing countries than for developed countries. (2) Linguistic h...

Recent studies using artificial language learning have argued that the cross-linguistic frequency of harmonic word order patterns–in which heads are ordered consistently before or after dependents across syntactic categories–reflects a cognitive bias (Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012; Culbertson & Newport, 2015a). These studies suggest that English speaking adults and children favor harm...

The lexical transfer phase is the most crucial step in MT because most of difficult problems are caused by lexical differences between two languages. In order to treat lexical issues systematically in transfer-based MT systems, we introduce the concept of bilingual-sings which are defined by pairs of equivalent monolingual signs. The bilingual signs not only relate the local linguistic structur...

We present an annotation model of modality which is (i) cross-linguistic, relying on a wide, strongly typologically motivated approach, and (ii) hierarchical and layered, accounting for both factuality and speaker’s attitude, while modelling these two aspects through separate annotation schemes. Modality is defined through cross-linguistic categories, but the classification of actual linguistic...

The Optional Infinitive (OI) phenomenon in children’s speech has attracted a great deal of attention due to its occurrence in a variety of languages (including English, Dutch and German), and its apparent absence in other languages (such as Spanish and Italian). Wexler (1998) explains this pattern of results in terms of a Unique Checking Constraint that interacts with cross-linguistic differenc...

A major open question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the modularity of language: does human language rely, in part, on neural processes that are not language specific? Such reliance would predict that learning should transfer between non-linguistic and linguistic domains via this common neural basis. To test this prediction, we studied effects of non-linguistic cognitive sequence training o...

Absolute linguistic universals are often justified by cross-linguistic analysis: If all observed languages exhibit a property, the property is taken to be a likely universal, perhaps specified in the cognitive or linguistic systems of language learners and users. In many cases, these patterns are then taken to motivate linguistic theory. Here, we show that cross-linguistic analysis will very ra...

Approaches in Visual Analytics have so far been developed for a wide array of research areas, mainly with a focus on industrial or business applications. The field of linguistics, however, has only marginally incorporated visualizations in its research, e.g. using simple tree representations, attribute-value matrices or network analyses. This paper suggests a new interesting field of applicatio...