0000000000596432
AUTHOR
Pauli Brattico
Comprehensive auditory discrimination profiles recorded with a fast parametric musical multi-feature mismatch negativity paradigm
Abstract Objective Mismatch negativity (MMN), a component of the auditory event-related potential (ERP) in response to auditory-expectancy violation, is sensitive to central auditory processing deficits associated with several clinical conditions and to auditory skills deriving from musical expertise. This sensitivity is more evident for stimuli integrated in complex sound contexts. This study tested whether increasing magnitudes of deviation (levels) entail increasing MMN amplitude (or decreasing latency), aiming to create a balanced version of the musical multi-feature paradigm towards measurement of extensive auditory discrimination profiles in auditory expertise or deficits. Methods Usi…
Erottava tekijä
Ihmisten käyttämä kieli eroaa eläinten käyttämistä kommunikaatiojärjestelmistä. Ihmisen aivoissa on 'erottava tekijä', joka mahdollistaa luonnollisen kielen oppimisen spontaanisti ihmislasten, mutta ei muiden eläinten tapauksessa. Artikkelissa luodaan katsaus siihen, mikä tämä erottava tekijä on, miten se toteutuu ihmisen aivoissa ja miten se on syntynyt biologisessa evoluutiossa. Lähteinä käytetään aivotutkimusta, evoluutioteoriaa, genetiikkaa, vertailevaa eläintiedettä ja kielitiedettä. Johtopäätöksenä esitetään, että ihmisen evolutiivisessa lähimenneisyydessä olisi tapahtunut aivojen (erityisesti Brocan alueen) organisaatiota muuttanut mutaatiosarja, joka mahdollistaa yksilönkehityksen v…
Case assignment, case concord, and quantificational case constructions
Abstract This paper examines a controversial and particularly complex case phenomenon called quantificational case attested in a number of historically unrelated Slavonic and Finno-Ugric languages, and attempts to establish certain novel cross-linguistic generalizations and conclusions. In particular, it will be argued that (i) instead of standard one-to-one case assignment, in which one case assigner is case-related to one case assignee, a many-to-many case flow is attested; (ii) nominal case is not a privilege of full DPs, arguments or thematic roles; (iii) case reflects either local or nonlocal functional structure, whether in the verbal or nominal domain; and that (iv) there is no disti…
The origins of the aesthetic enjoyment of music - A review of the literature
Listeners attribute a positive or negative value to music. This aesthetic experience is known to be observable over the individuals’ entire life span, from early childhood to old age, and in every culture. It is then often concluded that such an aesthetic experience constitutes part of the human nature, having an important biological foundation. This assumption leads to the question of how aesthetic experience of music originated in the biological evolution. In this paper, we will explore this question in the light of evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and systems neuroscience. After reviewing the existing proposals, we conclude that the explanation of the origin of aesthetic expe…
Event-related potential (ERP) responses to violations of inflectional and derivational rules of Finnish
Event-related potentials (ERP) were used to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of inflectional and derivational morphology. The participants were presented with visual sentences containing critical words in which either inflectional, derivational or both rules (combined violation) of Finnish were violated. Inflectional anomalies violated a number agreement of a noun with a previous auxiliary word. Derivational violations included a word-internal selectional restriction violation, i.e., a root and suffix category violation. Combined violations contained both a number and a category violation. The phonemic length of the critical words was controlled. Inflectional violations elici…
On the semantic interpretation of complex causatives in Finnish: An experimental morphology approach
It is well documented that in some languages, such as in Finnish, it is possible to stack derivational morphemes iteratively to word stems. However, such complex words are seldom used in real communication, and it is unclear whether they are interpreted compositionally in tandem with their morphological structure. Here I studied the matter by eliciting semantic interpretations from ten native speakers of Finnish for words whose complexity and morphemic content were systematically varied. The results show that although the frequency of semantic interpretation decreases linearly as a function of the number of morphemes in a word (contrary to the case of ungrammatical words where the semantic …
Sandwich EPP hypothesis: Evidence from child Finnish
It is well-known that grammatical movement is somehow linked to functional heads. There is less agreement on the excact nature of this correlation. According to one view, phrases are moved to the specifier positions of functional heads because functional heads attract them. According to another view, movement is not triggered by functional heads alone, but depends on the larger grammatical context. For instance, one such proposal says that T (tense) becomes attractive only when selected by finite C (complementizer), while V becomes attractive when selected byv* (transitivizer). What attracts phrases are therefore the C–T system and thev*–V system as a whole, not the individual functional he…
Long Distance Case Assignment in Finnish*
. Long distance case assignment remains a little studied corner of grammar. This paper documents such phenomenon in Finnish. In this language the choice of the direct object case depends on several local and remote case assigners. Remote case assigners need not occupy the same clause as the assignees: case assignment penetrates any number of non-finite clause boundaries of all types, adjunct boundaries, and even noun heads. Two hypotheses concerning the phenomenon are put forward: one, which says that the phenomenon is essentially an illusion and involves only local case assignment, and another, which says that genuine long distance case assignment is at issue. The latter hypothesis will f…
Pied-piping domains and adjunction coincide in Finnish
It is well-known thatwh-pronouns may pied-pipe their containing host phrases as they move to their final scope positions. In Finnish, such pied-piping requires further that awh-element is situated at the left edge of host phrases, a position in which it ends up either through base generation or throughwh-movement. This article investigates which independent properties define such pied-piping domains. An empirical generalization will be defended according to which a phrase constitutes such pied-piping domain if and only if it is adjoinable. The hypothesis that pied-piping domains are islands is put into question. Secondarywh-movement, pied-piping and adjunction are thus intrinsically linked …
Kayne's model of Case and Finnish nominal phrases
The standard view concerning Case assignment or valuation is that Case is valued to determiner phrases (DPs) in syntax. Recently, Kayne has proposed an alternative model, in which Case is valued to lexical elements rather than to phrases. This article cites several facts from Finnish in support of this model. A detailed Kaynean model of Case is developed. According to this model, abstract Case is valued to lexical elements by the highest ranking c-commanding Case assigner when each phase (CP,vP) is sealed, where ranking is based on a particular Case Hierarchy and a simple notion of locality. Configurations in which Case is seemingly assigned under a spec–head relation are provided with an a…
Shallow Reductionism and the Problem of Complexity in Psychology
In his recent book The Mind Doesn't Work That Way, Fodor argues that computational modeling of global cognitive processes, such as abductive everyday reasoning, has not been successful. In this article the problem is analyzed in the framework of algorithmic information theory. It is argued that the failed approaches are characterized by shallow reductionism, which is rejected in favor of deep reductionism and nonreductionism.
Case Distribution and Nominalization: Evidence from Finnish
. In many languages, case is distributed among many grammatical elements inside of argument DPs. This article shows that case distribution in Finnish is sensitive to certain nontrivial structural properties of those DPs. This makes it possible to use case distribution as a tool to investigate the internal structure of a variety of DPs, including nominalized clauses. It is argued, based on such new evidence, that (i) there exists a syntactic nominalizer head n within various kinds of nominal phrases, and that (ii) genitive argument DPs of nominalized clauses undergo raising analogous to the EPP-triggered DP raising in finite clauses. Furthermore, these genitive arguments are base-generated …
Natural Language Parsing
Automatic natural language processing captures a lion’s share of the attention in open information management. In one way or another, many applications have to deal with natural language input. In this chapter the authors investigate the problem of natural language parsing from the perspective of biolinguistics. They argue that the human mind succeeds in the parsing task without the help of languagespecific rules of parsing and language-specific rules of grammar. Instead, there is a universal parser incorporating a universal grammar. The main argument comes from language acquisition: Children cannot learn language specific parsing rules by rule induction due to the complexity of unconstrain…