Prosody as a recursive embedding tool in production and perception of karajá

Abstract

Hierarchical or indirect recursion can be found in different domains of human language and thus, it has been claimed to be the only part of language that is specific to humans (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002). However, in the past decade, both the claims that, recursion is the central component of the “narrow faculty of language” and that, it should be present in all languages have been the object of intense debate (cf. Pinker & Jackendoff, 2005; Everett, 2005). This debate triggered the exploration of new frontiers in the examination of embedded structures, which have been examined in acquisition and in processing and have been shown to be implemented through a wide array of linguistic resources in different languages. This paper presents an acoustic description and a neuro-psycholinguistic analysis (ERP/EEG) of an uncommon cognitive device to embed relative clauses. It is implemented in Karajá, a Macro-Je language spoken in Central Brazil, which uses pitch accent to signal relativization: (i) [tori do‟rode] „the white man arrived‟ versus (ii) [tori doro‟de] „the white man who arrived‟, first described in Ribeiro as stress shift (2006). The major interest in studying this phenomenon is because in Karajá, more than structuring envelopes for acts of speech, prosody codes directly onto the central syntactic algorithm of recursion. We found evidence in favor of a stronger facilitation to process a coordinated structure than a recursive structure. We found smaller RTs and amplitudes in the EEG related to the coordinated conditions versus the embedding conditions. Also, it seems that even though embedding is harder to launch, hierarchical structuring makes it easier to process in the third embedding, when comprehenders learn they are in an embedding mode. Coordination, on the other hand, being a default, is easier to launch, but it seems to become progressively harder as it does not benefit from hierarchical structuring.

Língua, conhecimento e história

“…Em Karitiana (Tupí-Arikém), por exemplo, há alguns trabalhos mais aprofundados em semântica, como se pode ver em Müller et al (2006), Müller;Coutinho-Silva (2008), Müller (2009), Sanchez-Mendes (2009), Carvalho (2010) e Rocha (2011). Há ainda avanços no estudo da língua Karajá no campo da psicolinguística, cujos resultados podem ser vistos em Maia (2011), Maia (2016) e Gomes et al (2017), entre muitos outros. Em Análise do Discurso, por fim, pode-se mencionar ainda as contribuições de Souza (1991de Souza ( , 1994de Souza ( , 2007 no estudo da língua Bakairi (Karib).…”

Processing it-cleft sentences in Brazilian Portuguese: an ERP study of leftward-moved constituents in role-reversed sentences

“…In fact, many of such predictions have been tested in neuroscience experiments. There are electrophysiological findings, using EEG/ERP 4 methodology, testing how processing operates in terms of hierarchizing processes, drawing upon underlying morphological case information and not on surface order (BADER & LASSER, 1994;KAMIDE & MITCHELL, 1999;FRISCH, 2000;FRISCH & SCHLESEWSKY, 2001;BORNKESSEL ET AL., 2003;GOMES, 2009;2013;GOMES & FRANÇA, 2008;2013;GOMES et al, 2017).…”