Syntactic movement is a core concept in generative linguistics to account for word-order variation and long-distance dependencies, but its psychological and neurobiological status remains debated. Here, we test the neural reality of movement in English and Chinese by correlating brain activity during naturalistic listening with syntactic node counts, traces and word embeddings derived from X-bar style tree annotations. We find that deep structure significantly predicts neural responses in English but not in Chinese, providing partial support for movement-based accounts while revealing clear cross-linguistic differences.

“多语言神经机器翻译是提升低资源语言翻译质量的有效手段。由于不同语言之间字符差异较大,现有方法难以得到统一的词表征形式。泰语和老挝语属于具有音素相似性的低资源语言,考虑到利用语言相似性能够拉近语义距离,提出一种融入音素特征的多语言词表征学习方法:(1)设计音素特征表示模块和泰老文本表示模块,基于交叉注意力机制得到融合音素特征后的泰老文本表示,拉近泰老之间的语义距离;(2)在微调阶段,基于参数分化得到不同语言对特定的训练参数,缓解联合训练造成模型过度泛化的问题。实验结果表明在ALT数据集上,提出方法在泰-英和老-英两个翻译方向上,相比基线模型提升0.97和0.99个BLEU值。”