Mutual engagement between psycholinguistic and variationist sociolinguistic research is important: work to date shows quite different outcomes from these approaches. This chapter illustrates that, in general, heritage speakers maintain the grammatical structures and vocabulary of homeland varieties, in contradiction to widely held beliefs that language quickly “degrades” or is “bastardized” in immigrant communities, and in contradiction to many published studies about heritage languages. However, both approaches converge on finding change in one phonetic pattern in some of the languages analyzed. In this chapter, the potential sources of this apparent contradiction are explored, considering differences related to population, sample, methods of data collection, analysis, and predictors. This allows us to better understand whether, for example, reported “deficits” among heritage language speakers might be partly due to a deficit in test-taking and experience with formal contexts in the heritage language. It closes with a proposal for more coordinated work across methods.

The introduction to this volume describes its content. It also provides the rationale for including selected topics and provides comments on the manner of presentation adopted in this volume.

Computational psycholinguistics seeks to develop computational theories and implemented models of the cognitive systems that map an unfolding linguistic signal onto a mental representation of its meaning. Focusing primarily on language comprehension, this chapter begins with early theories of sentence processing, before reviewing several prominent implemented computational models. These accounts are largely informed by reading-time studies that seek to establish the strategies and constraints that determine how people resolve ambiguity. This review concludes with a more in-depth discussion of rational probabilistic accounts, for which there has been considerable consensus in recent years, and surprisal theory, which formally links these models with measures of human comprehension effort, such as reading times and brain potentials. Finally, an implemented neurobehavioral model of language comprehension is presented in greater detail, illustrating the benefit of linking computational models with several behavioral and neurophysiological indices of human comprehension, as well as the importance of looking beyond syntactic processing alone to the modeling of semantic comprehension and the role of world knowledge.

Chapter 5 describes the four chief domains of linguistic politeness in Korean: speech style, honorifics, terms of address, and gendered language. Based on characteristics of those four areas, the chapter proposes different variables governing when and how to use different components of polite language, in addition to two exceptional subcases of honorifics. The term “politeness” is used in this chapter in a broad sense to denote any linguistic expression that shows respect. Honorifics are a major component of linguistic politeness in this sense, but far from the only one.

Words pose a theoretical challenge in Chinese, but words pose a challenge in any language. Even though Chinese is written with monosyllabic, monomorphemic characters and no overt word boundaries, there is as much evidence here as there is in English or any other language for a level between the morpheme and the phrase, interfacing between the lexicon and the grammar. Yet their interface role makes words dynamic things, subject to distinct and often conflicting constraints from processing, semantics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. To emphasize the universality of this situation, the chapter starts with a quick look at the dynamic nature of English words before turning to focus on Chinese words, which a wide variety of data reveal as surprisingly English-like, including a strong preference for disyllabicity. The chapter ends by sketching a formalism that may help capture the universal yet dynamic nature of wordhood, showing how it helps account for some of the Chinese facts.

According to some researchers, different languages foster specific habits of processing information, which may be retained beyond the linguistic domain. In left-branching languages, for instance, the head is usually preceded by its dependents, and real-time sentence comprehension may require a different allocation of attention as compared to right-branching languages. Such sensitivity to the branching of languages may be so pervasive to also affect how humans process stimuli other than words in a sentence. In this chapter, we will review previous studies on the link between word order, statistical learning habits, and attention allocation, and specifically discuss the effects that branching habits may have on working memory processes, well beyond the linguistic domain. We will conclude by fostering a stronger cross-linguistic approach to the study of branching and working memory, and suggesting possible lines for future research.

Kelleen Toohey went to school on the Canadian prairies with Ukrainian-Canadian and Cree classmates. Strongly influenced by the civil rights movement, she continued to document diverse cultural practices to give students “voice.” Using video cameras, tripods, storyboards, and video editing software, she continues to enhance enaction in classrooms, including both human and non-human actors.

In this chapter, I discuss the relationship between acceptability judgments and other experimental techniques and the broader goals of comparative syntax. Acceptability judgment experiments quantify the impact that a small number of factors exert on acceptability across a sample of participants. By contrast, comparative syntax has typically sought to characterize systematic similarities and differences between grammatical systems, on various scales of abstraction (languages, dialects, individual grammars). In this chapter, I argue that acceptability judgment experiments can contribute to comparative syntax by quantifying subtle judgments within a language as a ”check” on intuitive judgments collected from underresourced languages, by establishing reliable trends across languages, and by exploring individual differences within a population. I emphasize that careful factorial designs, appropriate controls, and previously established, theoretically informed hypotheses are crucial to the success of applying experimental approaches to comparative syntax.

>What is “experimental syntax”? One could reasonably argue that all syntax is experimental, in the sense that traditional syntactic research is based on series of small, informal experiments. On the other hand, one might understand “experimental syntax” to refer to psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments that focus on the structure of sentences. In practice, though, the term “experimental syntax” is generally used to refer to the intersection of these two approaches: studies that focus on the varying acceptability of sentence types and explore this by means of formal experiments. The goal of the handbook is to review what we have learned in the area of experimental syntax, but also to make sense of what this new body of knowledge is telling us, understand how experimental studies relate to the study of syntax more broadly, and explore what type of work we should be doing as the field moves forward.