A core aspect of human speech comprehension is the ability to incrementally integrate consecutive words into a structured and coherent interpretation, aligning with the speaker\'s intended meaning. This rapid process is subject to multidimensional probabilistic constraints, including both linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic information within specific contexts, and it is their interpretative coherence that drives successful comprehension. To study the neural substrates of this process, we extract word-by-word measures of sentential structure from BERT, a deep language model, which effectively approximates the coherent outcomes of the dynamic interplay among various types of constraints. Using representational similarity analysis, we tested BERT parse depths and relevant corpus-based measures against the spatiotemporally resolved brain activity recorded by electro-/magnetoencephalography when participants were listening to the same sentences. Our results provide a detailed picture of the neurobiological processes involved in the incremental construction of structured interpretations. These findings show when and where coherent interpretations emerge through the evaluation and integration of multifaceted constraints in the brain, which engages bilateral brain regions extending beyond the classical fronto-temporal language system. Furthermore, this study provides empirical evidence supporting the use of artificial neural networks as computational models for revealing the neural dynamics underpinning complex cognitive processes in the brain.

Our study explores how previously acquired languages affect third language (L3) acquisition. The learning and control groups composed adpositional phrases and relative clauses, and then judged sentences with strict/sloppy readings presented in their L3. The results showed that native Japanese learners of Chinese were more influenced by the second language (English) for adpositional phrases and relative clauses than were native Chinese learners of Japanese, although both were influenced more by their native than second language (English) in strict/sloppy interpretation. This indicates that L3 acquisition can be influenced by all previously acquired languages and that the interrelationship between the positions of subgrammars in a sentence structure may influence learners\' assessment of the structural similarity of the selected subgrammars, making it an important trigger for non-facilitative transfer. Overall, structural similarities played a stronger role than did typological proximity. This study differs from traditional models of L3 acquisition that focus on wholesale or property transfer by beginning with an investigation of the conditions under which non-facilitative transfers occur. These two perspectives are integrated in terms of cognitive economy, pointing to a more promising direction for L3 acquisition research in the future.

The aim of this article is to provide an evolutionarily grounded explanation of central aspects of the structure of language. It begins with an account of the evolution of human causal reasoning. A comparison between humans and non-human primates suggests that human causal cognition is based on reasoning about the underlying forces that are involved in events, while other primates hardly understand external forces. This is illustrated by an analysis of the causal cognition required for early hominin tool use. Second, the thinking concerning forces in causation is used to motivate a model of human event cognition. A mental representation of an event contains two vectors representing a cause as well as a result but also entities such as agents, patients, instruments and locations. The fundamental connection between event representations and language is that declarative sentences express events (or states). The event structure also explains why sentences are constituted of noun phrases and verb phrases. Finally, the components of the event representation show up in language, where causes and effects are expressed by verbs, agents and patients by nouns (modified by adjectives), locations by prepositions, etc. Thus, the evolution of the complexity of mental event representations also provides insight into the evolution of the structure of language.

Both prosody and sentence structure (e.g., canonical versus non-canonical) affect sentence comprehension. However, few previous studies have examined a possible interaction between prosody and sentence structure. In adult controls we found a significant interaction: typical sentence prosody, versus list prosody, facilitated comprehension of only some sentence structures. In seven stroke patients, impaired attentional control was related to impaired comprehension with sentence prosody but not list prosody; impaired working memory was related to impaired comprehension with list prosody, but not sentence prosody. Thus, non-canonical sentence comprehension impairments in stroke patients may be modulated by prosody, based on a patient\'s cognitive abilities.

During comprehension, a listener can rapidly follow a frontally seated speaker\'s gaze to an object before its mention, a behavior which can shorten latencies in speeded sentence verification. However, the robustness of gaze-following, its interaction with core comprehension processes such as syntactic structuring, and the persistence of its effects are unclear. In two \"visual-world\" eye-tracking experiments participants watched a video of a speaker, seated at an angle, describing transitive (non-depicted) actions between two of three Second Life characters on a computer screen. Sentences were in German and had either subject(NP1)-verb-object(NP2) or object(NP1)-verb-subject(NP2) structure; the speaker either shifted gaze to the NP2 character or was obscured. Several seconds later, participants verified either the sentence referents or their role relations. When participants had seen the speaker\'s gaze shift, they anticipated the NP2 character before its mention and earlier than when the speaker was obscured. This effect was more pronounced for SVO than OVS sentences in both tasks. Interactions of speaker gaze and sentence structure were more pervasive in role-relations verification: participants verified the role relations faster for SVO than OVS sentences, and faster when they had seen the speaker shift gaze than when the speaker was obscured. When sentence and template role-relations matched, gaze-following even eliminated the SVO-OVS response-time differences. Thus, gaze-following is robust even when the speaker is seated at an angle to the listener; it varies depending on the syntactic structure and thematic role relations conveyed by a sentence; and its effects can extend to delayed post-sentence comprehension processes. These results suggest that speaker gaze effects contribute pervasively to visual attention and comprehension processes and should thus be accommodated by accounts of situated language comprehension.