Cognitive Psycholinguistics

How do we find meaning amidst an overwhelming amount of sensory information? Are the processes by which we categorize information independent of our language? Linguistic relativism suggests that our thoughts are shaped by our language. Linguistic universalism does not necessarily contradict this notion. It is possible that, while humans may share some inherent facility that allows us to develop language and higher-level cognition, every language that develops does not necessarily share some basic set of universal concepts. Different languages classify spatial relations by different criteria, picking out distinctive features another language might otherwise ignore. The present study presents native speakers of different languages―Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, (Persian) Farsi, and Hebrew―with animations portraying an array of different spatial relations. To control for variations in verb specificity, an artificial, constructed language (Klingon), will be used for responses. If relativists are right, participants should come up with significantly different spatial categories (emerging from the verbs they use) between groups.

Будући да најопштија  дефиниција менталног лексикона казује да је он инстанца меморије унутар семантичке, дугорочне меморије, можемо закључити да он сам представља некакав систем знања. Утолико што су јединице комуникације симболичке природе, подразумева се да су и знања којима баратамо унутар менталног лексикона врста симболичких знања. Како бисмо разумели начине долажења до многобројних теорија о организацији менталног лексикона, првенствено ћемо се укратко позабавити појмовима репрезентације знања и симболичког знања.

This research paper confers the importance of lullabies being sung to children, commencing from the pre-linguistic stage of language acquisition until the end of the first few years of the infancy.  Thus, this report deals with the contributory linguistic factors that lullabies bear in triggering the language acquisition of infants apart from the first language cues that they receive and perceive through the speech that the adults use to communicate with them. The intention of this is to determine the whole-scale linguistic significance of lullabies, which are a universally shared experience within the human race. This once again investigates whether lullabies are mere sleep inducing melodies or whether they possess distinctive traits that reinforce language cues to the highly absorbent infant brain. The research was conducted using two methodologies: Questionnaire in Sinhala language was issued to twenty eight mothers, who have children until the age of three years, to provide personal and authentic responses, and a linguistic analysis of a Sinhala lullaby was done using the linguistic knowledge of the researcher. However, there could be different theories regarding this since actual baby brain image in the presence of lullabies was absent in the course of this research. Consequently, the results reveal that lullabies enrich the child linguistic development and thereby suggest the necessity to diverge the linguistic eye on lullabies as a rich resource which evokes and feeds diverse linguistic skills. Lullabies do not reach the heights as parentese do, but they are a rich resource which ensures informal education of an infant’s first language. Hence, this research outlines the value of incorporating lullabies to communicate with children and assertively recommends their usage.       

KEYWORDS: enrich, language acquisition, linguistic development, lullabies, speech

This study aimed to investigate relationship between resilience as a personality factor defined in positive psychology and autonomous learning as a newly developed subject in learning and teaching (EFL area). This research employed resilience scale by Connor and Davidson (2003) and learner autonomy questionnaire by Spratt, Humphreys and Chan (2002) to evaluate EFL learners' resilience level and their autonomy. To meet the purpose of this study, about 150 male and female participants randomly selected among undergraduate students majoring English language translation. Collected data of two questionnaires were analyzed through Spearman's correlation and regression. Findings of the correlation analysis revealed that there is a significant relationship between resilience and autonomy (ρ = .29, n = 156, p < .01). Also, results showed that resilience is a strong predictor for autonomous learning.

Український асоціативний словник укладено за матеріалами психолінгвістичного експерименту з носіями української мови. Цей Словник продовжує традиції української лексикографії в галузі укладання асоціативних словників, започатковані Н. П. Бутенко. Охоплює слова різних частин мови, що дає змогу розширити дослідження ментального лексикону і відтворити значні фрагменти вербальної пам'яті носіїв української мови і культури. Реакції респондентів чоловічої і жіночої статі у Словнику подані окремо, що дає змогу використовувати його матеріали для ґендерних досліджень. Розглянуті цілісно, матеріали Словника допомагають виявити культурно-специфічні особливості концептуальної картини світу, що втілена в українській мові. Для мовознавців і викладачів української мови, перекладачів, психологів, соціологів і студентів усіх зазначених спеціальностей."

This paper is concerned with the relation of thought and language, especially with the inner workings of human conceptual thought. The questions it set out to answer were whether humans think in language and how language might limit human thinking. What the current research has shown, is that both of these questions can be negated, as they do not stand up to scrutiny.

This is a psycholinguistic dissertation that explores if the acquisition of vocabulary can be promoted during middle school (12-15 year olds) through a form of meditation known as imaginary journeys. Its aim is to find a creative way to learn a foreign language by closely linking the mental processes associated with learning a native language. To do so, the imaginary journeys required a connection between the target vocabulary and one’s personal associations and memories. The theoretical part of the dissertation elaborates on language acquisition and native- and foreign-language learning studies. The ways in which one’s memory functions, as well as meditation and cognition, are also explored. This dissertation shows that imaginary journeys contribute to the acquisition of vocabulary and to interesting working conditions in the classroom.

The purpose of this qualitative grounded theory study was to assess component models of a model of education that incorporates multiple language acquisition. The Research Literature indicates that third language (L3) learning enhances both L2 and L1 as long as L1 and L2 are supported. This stratified systematic grounded theory study explored the perspectives of neurolinguists, psycholinguists, sociolinguists, and interdisciplinary multilingual education researchers to derive variables for constructing a complex multilingual model of education. The outcome of the Internet survey revealed that 100% of the researcher participants agreed that multilingual education and teacher training must improve. Variables from the cross-disciplinary data contributed to the construction of an integrated model of multilingual education consisting four models as well as tools for implementing multilingual education. The first of four models emerged from the data to offer the foundational principles of multilingual education. The other three models are macro, meso, and micro models. The macro model represents schools, instruction, assessment, and the curriculum cycle. The meso model depicts the developmental domains of the individual learner: Cognitive, Affective, Psychomotor, Education, Contextual, and intrinsically linked Motivation & Identity. The meso model also offers a synergetic equation. The micro model delineates multilingual processing in the brain based on current neurological research and variables from the current study. This study receive both national and international attention: national attention with a synopsis published as the chapter 4 in a monograph published by the Refractive Thinker Press; and international attention with a synopsis published in the August 2012 issue of the International Journal of Multilingualism.

Український асоціативний словник укладено за матеріалами психолінгвістичного експерименту з носіями української мови. Цей Словник продовжує традиції української лексикографії в галузі укладання асоціативних словників, започатковані Н. П. Бутенко. Охоплює слова різних частин мови, що дає змогу розширити дослідження ментального лексикону і відтворити значні фрагменти вербальної пам'яті носіїв української мови і культури. Реакції респондентів чоловічої і жіночої статі у Словнику подані окремо, що дає змогу використовувати його матеріали для ґендерних досліджень. Розглянуті цілісно, матеріали Словника допомагають виявити культурно-специфічні особливості концептуальної картини світу, що втілена в українській мові. Для мовознавців і викладачів української мови, перекладачів, психологів, соціологів і студентів усіх зазначених спеціальностей."

Publisher: Львів: Видавничий центр ЛНУ імені Івана Франка, 2007.

Cognitive Linguistics, which primarily deals with the conceptual structures of human mind via their language manifestation, opens new prospects in study- ing binary oppositions. Despite numerous researches of this phenomenon, lots of questions raised here do not have
exhaustive answers. What we need is not only inquiry oriented toward ascertainment of the universality (or the degree of universality) of some binary oppositions, but studies of their system in a certain linguaculture within a given time period. The precise study of interrelations
among various symbolic domains in this sphere is another important problem. Furthermore, binary oppositions should not be seen as stable and unchangeable structures presented within human consciousness but they must be regarded as the external manifestation of specific cognitive
mechanisms. This  paper  presents  an  empirical investigation  of  the  binary  opposition
LIGHT-DARK based on the method of an associative experiment. The analysis of the responses clearly reveals binary oppositions which are deep-rooted in the speakers’ consciousness and which closely interact. These oppositions build a rich background for the metaphorical interchange between corresponding domains which create a whole system where the correlating parts are used
for the metaphoric designation of each other. The main focus of this study is the interaction of cognitive mechanisms of contradistinction with conceptual metaphor and further analysis of the result of this process in a language.

This thesis investigates the expenditure of cognitive effort in post-editing of machine translation. A mixed-method approach involving the use of eye movements, subjective ratings and think-aloud protocols was adopted for the investigation. The project aims at revealing connections between cognitive effort and variables including linguistic characteristics of the source text and the machine-translation output, post-editors’ individual traits, different linguistic aspects of the activity attended to during the task, and the quality of the post-edited texts, assessed by human translators in terms of fluency (linguistic quality) and adequacy (faithfulness to the source text). Two tasks were conducted to pursue these aims: one involving eye tracking and a self-report scale of cognitive effort, and another carried out by a different, but comparable, sample of participants, under a think-aloud condition. Results indicate that variables such as an automatic machine-translation quality score and source-text type-token ratio are good predictors of cognitive effort in post-editing. The relationship between cognitive effort and post-editors’ traits was found to be a complex one, with significant links in this respect only appearing in the context of interactions between variables. A complex relationship was also found between editing behaviour and the quality of the post-edited text: the number of changes implemented was found to have a generally positive association with post-edited fluency, though cognitive effort was found to be negatively correlated with both the fluency and adequacy of the post-edited texts. Mental processes involving grammar and lexis were significantly related to the levels of cognitive effort expended by participants. These were also the aspects most frequently attended to in the activity. From a methodological perspective, despite the criticisms received by the think-aloud method in previous research, empirical data obtained in this project indicates that think-aloud protocols correlate with eye movements and subjective ratings as measures of cognitive effort.

El discurso científico-académico oral es una práctica usual en el ámbito académico, sin embargo son escasos los estudios sobre los géneros que conforman este tipo de discurso: conferencias, ponencias, charlas, clases teóricas, exposiciones orales. En este trabajo nos ocuparemos del análisis de la “conferencia” como género discursivo oral, en el idioma francés. Nos centraremos particularmente en su macro-estructura y las “secciones”  que la componen – apertura del discurso, introducción, desarrollo y epilogo - definidas a partir del modelo CARS de Swales (1990, y sus adaptaciones: Carter Thomas y Rowley-Jolivet, 2003; Robles Garrote, 2013).  Nuestro corpus consta de nueve videoconferencias  extraídas de internet, que tratan temáticas propias de las ciencias humanas y sociales. El análisis muestra que la gran mayoría de las conferencias respetan cada una de las « secciones », sin embargo, existen variaciones en los « movimientos » de cada « sección ». Por ejemplo en la introducción al tema, los expositores se valen de diferentes estrategias. Presentaremos brevemente algunas diferencias con las conferencias en idioma portugués. Estos estudios contrastivos  se inscriben en el marco de un proyecto de investigación cuya finalidad consiste en diseñar una metodología de enseñanza-aprendizaje del discurso académico oral, en las lenguas extranjeras alemán, francés, inglés y portugués.

This chapter aims to provide a linguist's perspective on the problem of musical meaning. It will explore how some theoretical constructs of modern linguistics, especially of cognitive semantics, may inform discussions of musical signification, in particular the conceptualization of musical movement. The effort has three main goals: (1) to present a research program on music, language, and movement that my group has worked on in the last ten years, by introducing the basic methodological conceptions, theoretical developments and experimental results; this includes the role of image schemas,  metaphors, conceptual blends and “grounding” in the process in which listeners (attempt to) understand music; (2) to provide an outline of possible extensions of the current approach, both experimental and theoretical, that I am developing with colleagues in the form of draft protocols and project proposals as this text is being written;  these include, on the one hand, corpus linguistic exploration, behavioral and neurophysiological cross-cultural experiments with children and adults and, on the other, the incorporation of new phenomena in the theoretical paradigm (e.g. fictive interaction, synchronized embodiment); (3) while most chapters in this book will likely focus on the importance of these and similar constructs for music theory, in the concluding section I propose to do the reverse: discuss how studies of musical meaning, especially those of cognitively-oriented music theorists, may help resolve some controversies in cognitive linguistics; specifically, I will focus on how “conceptual primitives” and “prolongational reduction” from Ray Jackendoff's conceptual semantics may deepen the insights into the meaning of (musical) concepts at certain points at which standard, constructivist, embodied cognitive semantics seems to stop halfway.

This book represents a personal understanding and interpretation of the role of working memory in second language acquisition (SLA). Through this book, I hope to bring together and then integrate the several areas of my current research foci, namely, working memory research in cognitive sciences, and language aptitude research as well as L2 task-based planning research in SLA.

Several indicators seem to suggest that, through nearly six decades of development, Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS) may be taking shape as an autonomous field of study. The main challenges ahead seem to be building sounder theoretical models and carrying out more rigorous methodological scrutiny. These two strands converge as central themes in the 11 contributions to this special issue of LANS-TTS. To provide a context for theoretical modelling and to frame critical discussions of the methods included in this volume, we first trace the present landscape of CTS and how it evolved so as to test Holmes’ criteria for disciplines: founding new channels of communication and sharing a “disciplinary utopia”. The contributions are arranged into four thematic categories as applied to CTS, namely, scientometrics, framing or reframing our field, the reliability and validity of popular research methods, and new methods or novel approaches. This article closes with a call to reflect on some f...

De Rerum Natura - Evolutionary origins of cultural differences: the «Hofstede effect»!

One key toward a deeper understanding of cultural differences will come from changing the way in which social scientists could conceptualize them. Specifically, cultural differences in national cultures can be conceptualize more than «broad preferences» as alternative strategies for solving recurrent collective adaptive problems. I believe that Evolutionary Psychology (EP) offer a solid approach to explain the cultural diversity puzzle. Accordingly, in this paper I will try to (re)frame culture differences within EP perspective trying to answer to several questions: what’s the origin of human culture diversity and why do we have so many different cultures?
I will also present evidences that support some relevant consequences and predictions of Hofstede insightful dimensions for human and collective behavior.

Successful speech perception requires that listeners map the acoustic signal to linguistic categories. These mappings are not only probabilistic, but change depending on the situation. For example, one talker's /p/ might be physically indistinguishable from another talker's /b/ (cf. *lack of invariance*). We characterize the computational problem posed by such a subjectively non-stationary world and propose that the speech perception system overcomes this challenge by (1) recognizing previously encountered situations, (2) generalizing to other situations based on previous similar experience, and (3) adapting to novel situations. We formalize this proposal in the {\em ideal adapter} framework: (1) to (3) can be understood as inference under uncertainty about the appropriate generative model for the current talker, thereby facilitating robust speech perception despite the lack of invariance. We focus on two critical aspects of the ideal adapter. First, in situations that clearly deviate from previous experience, listeners need to adapt. We develop a distributional (belief-updating) learning model of incremental adaptation. The model provides a good fit against known and novel phonetic adaptation data, including perceptual recalibration and selective adaptation. Second, robust speech recognition requires listeners learn to represent the *structured* component of cross-situation variability in the speech signal.  We discuss how these two aspects of the ideal adapter provide a unifying explanation for adaptation, talker-specificity, and generalization across talkers and groups of talkers (e.g., accents and dialects). The ideal adapter provides a guiding framework for future investigations into speech perception and adaptation, and more broadly language comprehension.

Keywords: speech perception; generalization; adaptation; statistical learning; hierarchical structure; lack of invariance; non-stationarity

The acceptability judgment task is a crucial method in  experimental syntax. This study compares two forms of the task –Likert-scale and magnitude estimations – in the investigation of the learnability of the English resultative construction for bilinguals of Brazilian Portuguese and English. The resultative poses a challenge for this population, as not only must they learn the syntax-semantics mapping unlicensed in their L1, but they must learn event structure constraints that govern such construction in the L2. The results indicate that while both controlled acceptability judgment tasks attest the learnability of the construction, the alleged superiority of magnitude estimations was not verified.

Psycholinguistics, as its name suggests, encompasses the psychology of language as well as linguistic psychology. Although they might sound similar, they are actually distinct. The first is a branch of linguistics, while the latter is a subdivision of psychology. In the psychology of language, the means are the research tools adopted from psychology and the end is the study of language. However, in linguistic psychology, the means are the data derived from linguistic studies and the end is psychology. This chapter focuses on the first of these two components; that is, the psychology of language. The goal of this chapter is to give a state of the art perspective on the small but growing body of research using psycholinguistic tools to study Persian with a focus on two areas: presenting longstanding debates about the mental lexicon, language impairments and language processing; and introducing a source of data for the linguistic analysis of Persian.

Convegno Dille 2015 “Lingua al plurale: la formazione degli insegnanti”


Obiettivo del contributo è diffondere la consapevolezza dell’esistenza del processing tra gli insegnanti di LS/L2 e suggerire l’inserimento, all’interno dell’approccio comunicativo, di attività che tengano conto di questo elemento, in particolare nell’ambito dell’insegnamento dell’italiano L2. Nell’ambito degli studi sul linguaggio, per processing si intendono i meccanismi cognitivi attivati in tempo reale e senza controllo conscio nella pianificazione, produzione o comprensione di un enunciato, in L1 o L2. Come dice lo stesso modello di produzione del linguaggio di Levelt et al. ’99, e come ricordato da Hulstijn ’07, il comprendere o produrre un enunciato innesca un processing parallelo dove la componente conscia della cognizione non è l’unica coinvolta. Nell’attivazione di questi meccanismi sono coinvolti le risorse e proprietà della mente e, nel caso dell’apprendimento di LS/L2, anche i principi dell’apprendimento. In che cosa consistano questi meccanismi e, soprattutto, che ruolo essi abbiano nella comprensione e della produzione del linguaggio, è ancora oggetto di dibattito. I modularisti distinguono tra processing non linguistico e processing linguistico, guidato dal modulo della sintassi, rispetto al quale è dipendente. I non-modularisti, invece, ritengono che le capacità cognitive generali (quali la memoria, l’attenzione, capacità di segmentare o classificare l’input) abbiano un rapporto di pari a pari con i meccanismi alla guida del linguaggio e che quindi, nel pianificare, produrre o comprendere un enunciato, la parte governata dalla cognizione generale non vada messa in secondo piano. Sebbene quindi non esista, nell’ambito degli studi sul linguaggio, una teoria generale del processing, anche gli approcci modularisti riconoscono l’esistenza di meccanismi cognitivi generali che, seppure slegati da quelli linguistici, appartengono a pieno titolo tra i fattori da considerare nell’ambito degli studi sull’acquisizione del linguaggio. Considerati pertanto i contributi di linguisti, neurolinguisti e psicolinguisti in questa direzione, sarebbe auspicabile includere lo studio del processing nei programmi di formazione degli insegnanti di italiano L2. Gli apprendenti italiano L2, immigrati e richiedenti asilo, hanno la specifica necessità di imparare il prima possibile l’italiano, per inserirsi nella vita civile e/o perché inseriti in programmi speciali (progetti Sprar, che prevedono spesso il conseguimento della licenza media già nel primo anno in Italia), ma l’acquisizione profonda di una lingua richiede tempo e la maggior parte di loro non sono abituati all’apprendimento (o, nel caso dei sinofoni, sono scolarizzati in una lingua con sistema di scrittura visuale). Studi di Hulstijn ‘07, Segalowitz ‘07, Clahsen & Felser ’06, Rastelli ’13 dimostrano che gli ostacoli sono due (acquisizione della grammatica e processing) e Riesenhuber ’15 ha evidenziato l’esistenza di un’area cerebrale specifica per la forma delle parole. Poiché quindi il processing condiziona l’apprendente attraverso automatismi concernenti la ricezione acustica e grafica delle parole e molti apprendenti non sono consapevoli dell’importanza di sapere usare la L2 in modo corretto, accontentandosi di “capire e farsi capire”, sarà proposto un Approccio Lessicale-Dichiarativo avente l’obiettivo di: a) evitare che lo studente processi la LS/L2 come la L1; b) stimolare la memoria dichiarativa per radicare congiuntamente chunks di lessico e grammatica.

I fenomeni linguistici possono essere predetti facendo riferimento a tre grandi classi di modelli: i modelli basati su regole, quelli basati su un apprendimento statistico e quelli basati sugli esempi (tra cui i modelli analogici). L’efficacia di ciascun tipo di modello dipende dal fenomeno esaminato. Nel caso dell’assegnazione dell’accento lessicale in italiano, alcuni casi sembrano attribuibili all’applicazione di una regola, altri alle conoscenze distribuzionali dei lettori. Niente, tuttavia, è stato detto sul possibile contributo dell’analogia. In questo lavoro, si presenta un caso di assegnazione dell’accento attraverso l’attivazione del lessico fonologico, supportato dall’analisi di un corpus e da un esperimento di lettura. I risultati sono discussi nei termini di un modello analogico del linguaggio.

Asperger Syndrome (AS) is often associated with social, cognitive, motor, and language problems, but an estimated number of AS bilingual individuals with this syndrome; especially those with social communication disorders (SCD) typically receive the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Consequently, such inaccurate diagnosis has negative effects not only at the linguistic level, but also at the level of treatment method where AS is merely a subgroup of ASD just like higher-functioning autism (HFA) or pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS). Utilizing Peabody picture vocabulary test (PPVT-3) in Arabic and then in English to test an AS bilingual 12 year-old boy with SCD, the first aim of the current pilot case study was to investigate the cause-effect relationship between AS and pragmatics mechanism where these children, the researchers hypothesize, fail to crystallize implied meaning of the target language (L2), not the source language (L1), which will help identify what language and which of its aspect (s) is affected more. The study also compared two ASD diagnostic methods: Autism diagnostic observation schedule (ADOS) and Australian scale for Asperger's syndrome (ASAS). The purpose was to specify which of these two assessment tools suits more AS individuals with SCD where, again, the researchers claim the former to be more accountable than the latter as it depends on the explanatory approach unlike the latter that follows the exploratory approach. The tests were administered in light of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-V) and international classification of diseases and related health problems (ICD). To ensure the reliability and validity of the study, the researchers analyzed all case's monthly and yearly school exams of both English (Case's L1) and Arabic (Case's L2) language courses starting with the 1 st grade and culminating with the 7 th grade in addition to an intelligence quotient (IQ) test that has been given prior to the tests. In addition, series of interviews were held with the parent along with related individuals to the case. Of the two languages, outlined results show significant deterioration in meaning comprehension in both L1 and L2. Compared with ASAS, ADOS found to be more accountable as it provides specific authentic data of the social behavior, cognitive and motor functions and linguistic and communication abilities of AS bilinguals with SCD in standardized and well-documented contexts. Further research on multilingualism and other ASD subgroups using large number of population, different methods and additional clinical resources is needed to turn the study from individuality into commonality; therefore, replicate its findings and generalize its outcomes.

This Ph.D. dissertation addresses possible bilingualism effects on speakers’ linguistic processing and representation through a psycholinguistic methodology. Our primary focus is the analysis of how bilingualism can influence bilinguals’ first language (L1), but we also investigate possible phenomena present in the acquisition of a second language (L2)-specific structure. More specifically, the research objectives are (i) to verify whether bilinguals exhibit reduced processing cost to read an L2-specific construction in the L1, (ii) to analyze whether these bilinguals accept this construction in their L1 and (iii) to investigate if bilinguals learn both the licensed and the unlicensed features of this construction in the L2. The participants are highly proficient Brazilian Portuguese (BP)-English bilinguals immersed either in the L1 or in the L2. The target structure is the resultative construction (e.g., Samuel wiped the table clean) and our control structure is the depictive construction (e.g., Samuel ate the salmon raw). Both constructions are grammatical in English, but only the depictive is licensed in BP. Furthermore, we observe how the participants process and perceive some ungrammatical resultative sentences (e.g., Samuel twisted the toy broken) in English. In order to reach the research objectives, we conducted a series of experiments using the Maze Task (MT) and the Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) paradigms in both BP and English. The results from the experiments in BP indicate that both immersed and non-immersed bilinguals process the adjective in the resultative construction significantly faster than BP monolinguals. However, bilinguals and monolinguals perceived the resultative construction as less acceptable than the depictive construction. These results suggest that bilingualism can exert influence on L1 linguistic processing, but such influence does not result in changes in bilinguals’ overall L1 grammar, at least in regards to the constructions under scrutiny. The data from the experiments in English indicates that bilinguals and monolinguals process the resultative construction as fast as they process the depictive construction. They also show an additional processing cost when reading the ungrammatical resultative sentences. Moreover, bilinguals and monolinguals do not differ significantly from each other in their acceptability judgments of the resultative sentences in English, but bilinguals give significantly higher acceptability ratings to the ungrammatical resultative sentences as compared to monolinguals. These results suggest that bilinguals can learn L2-specific constructions, but they are less sensitive to L2-specific restrictions than monolinguals are. We discuss all these findings in light of different theoretical perspectives, among which we highlight the Multi-Competence, the Multiple-Grammars and the Negative Evidence hypotheses.