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        <title>Frontiers in Language Sciences | New and Recent Articles</title>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/language-sciences</link>
        <description>RSS Feed for Frontiers in Language Sciences | New and Recent Articles</description>
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        <pubDate>2026-10-18T16:30:23.94+00:00</pubDate>
        <ttl>60</ttl>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1957524</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1957524</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Language management in the age of LLMs: AI tools in proofreading as emerging norm authorities?]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-10-15T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Perspective</category>
        <author>Vít Dovalil</author><author>Adriana Hanulíková</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Who decides what counts as “correct” or standard language today? Correcting language has always been an act of authority. This authority seems now to be quietly shifting toward large language models (LLMs), because they are routinely consulted for proofreading in educational, academic, and professional contexts, valued for the apparent ease with which they produce standardized, well-formed texts. However, which linguistic norm these models draw on when “correcting” language remains underexplored. This is a critical issue, because less linguistically informed users are more likely to accept AI-generated corrections uncritically. In this paper, we examine such corrections and argue that treating LLMs as de facto norm authorities with regard to standard language is premature. We first rethink standard language as a sociolinguistic concept that is negotiated among linguists, norm authorities, model speakers/writers, and codifiers (authors of dictionaries, grammars etc.) rather than a fixed property of a language. We then illustrate LLMs' performance in proofreading empirically, by submitting a German text containing 13 targeted morphosyntactic phenomena for grammar correction to six LLMs (eight model configurations) at three time points. Expectedly, results show variability both between and within models over time, as well as some consistency and several discrepancies with codification and model texts. LLMs, we conclude, may be reasonably reliable for some morphosyntactic variables, and they could be treated as an autonomous norm authority if they can be shown to draw transparently on knowledge codified by reliable sources.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1953328</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1953328</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Do large language models keep the hedge? Uncertainty preservation when large language models summarize aviation and maritime incident reports]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-10-12T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Simon Baradziej</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Safety-incident reports are written with deliberate epistemic caution: A reporter marks what was seen, what was inferred, and what remains unsure, and a dropped hedge can turn a tentative observation into an apparent cause. As large language models take over summarizing such reports for triage, indexing, and search, whether they preserve that caution becomes a property of the safety record itself. This study asks whether models keep a reporter's expressed uncertainty when they summarize, testing two hypotheses fixed before any summary was generated: that models systematically harden uncertainty by default and that an explicit instruction to preserve it overcorrects into softening. Six open-weight models summarized 42 real incident reports, 30 from the United States Aviation Safety Reporting System and 12 from the United Kingdom Marine Accident Investigation Branch, under a plain prompt, a preserve prompt, and a paraphrase of it. Uncertainty change was measured two ways: at the passage level, by a deterministic epistemic-marker lexicon, and at the claim level, by aligning those markers between source and summary, each validated against manual annotation and cross-checked against two independent language-model judges. Under plain summarization, all six models hardened the reporter's uncertainty (claim-level hardening 0.59–0.85), dropping explicit hedges almost entirely (retention about 0.08) while epistemic modal verbs survived far better. The preserve instruction reversed the pattern into over-softening: In a cluster-robust logistic regression, it carried an odds ratio of 0.12 (95% CI [0.03, 0.49], p = 0.003) and held once summary length was controlled, so the change reflects expressed certainty rather than compression. In practical terms, the instruction lowered the predicted probability of hardening from about 0.43 to 0.13 (Cohen's h = 0.69), and the effect held in mixed-effects models and under adverse imputation of the missing outputs. The pattern was directionally consistent across the tested models and both instruction wordings. Automated safety triage that relies on model summaries should measure epistemic fidelity directly and not treat a single preserve instruction as a solution.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1828340</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1828340</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Metaphors' journeys across time and genre: tracking the evolution of literary metaphors with temporal embeddings]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-10-09T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Veronica Mangiaterra</author><author>Chiara Barattieri di San Pietro</author><author>Paolo Canal</author><author>Valentina Bambini</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Metaphors are a distinctive feature of literary language, yet they remain less studied experimentally than everyday metaphors. Moreover, previous psycholinguistic and computational approaches overlooked the temporal dimension, although many literary metaphors were coined centuries apart from contemporary readers. This study innovatively applies tools from diachronic distributional semantics to assess whether the processing costs of literary metaphors varied over time and genre. Specifically, we used the Word2Vec algorithm and period-specific literary and nonliterary corpora, for a total of 124 million tokens, to generate word embeddings. Using these embeddings, we modeled changes in the semantic similarity between topics and vehicles of 515 19th-century literary metaphors, taking this measure as a proxy for metaphor processing demands. Overall, semantic similarity, and hence metaphor processing demands, remained stable over time. However, genre played a key role: metaphors appeared more difficult (i.e., lower topic-vehicle similarity) in modern literary contexts than in 19th-century literature, but easier (i.e., higher topic-vehicle similarity) in today's nonliterary language (e.g., the web) than in 19th-century nonliterary texts. This pattern was further shaped by semantic features of metaphors' individual terms, such as vector coherence and semantic neighborhood density. Collectively, these findings align with broader linguistic changes in Italian, such as the stylistic simplification of modern literature, which may have increased metaphor processing demands, and the high creativity of the web's language, which seems to render metaphor more accessible.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1955851</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1955851</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Beyond the bridge: an integrative developmental framework for first-language reading fluency]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-10-07T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Conceptual Analysis</category>
        <author>János Steklács</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Reading fluency is central to reading development, yet its conceptual boundaries and changing relations with word recognition and comprehension remain unsettled. This conceptual analysis proposes that fluency development changes how processing time is organized across connected text. As word identification consolidates, timing is hypothesized to become increasingly responsive to linguistic integration demands and reading goals. Fluent performance can therefore include selective local slowing followed by recovery of continuity. The framework draws on established accounts of automaticity, synchronization, word-to-text integration, and strategic regulation. Fluency is characterized through accuracy, temporal continuity and pace regulation, and, in oral reading, prosodic organization. Connected-text coordination is proposed to explain the temporal relationships among word identification, linguistic grouping, and local meaning updating. Three overlapping configurations organize the relative prominence of lexical constraints, integration demands, and regulation by meaning and reading goals. Their number and developmental ordering remain hypotheses. Reading experience can support lexical consolidation and better calibrated linguistic expectations, with oral-language resources, morphological development, compensatory profiles, and orthographic variation constraining the account. The primary hypothesis predicts that, as word identification consolidates under comparable reading conditions, the association between global reading rate and comprehension will weaken, while the association between demand-sensitive local timing and comprehension will remain stable or strengthen. This joint prediction follows from the proposed change in processing constraints, beyond faster word identification alone. Secondary hypotheses address goal-dependent rereading and generalization across oral and silent reading. Evaluation requires independently specified demands and outcomes, longitudinal measurement, and comparison with existing accounts. The framework's proposed contribution is a developmental explanation linking the organization of processing time to the changing informativeness of fluency indicators. Its explanatory value depends on these commitments distinguishing it from alternative accounts.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1937860</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1937860</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Rethinking body partonymy: transverse analogous paradigms across world languages]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-10-07T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Jamin Pelkey</author>
        <description><![CDATA[The part-whole relations of body-part lexemes, or “body partonymy,” might seem like a key source of evidence for shared conceptual systems in support of embodiment theories of cognition, but widespread variation in this lexical field across world languages calls this assumption into question. Recent studies focus on radical mismatches and random overlap relative to isolated frames of contrast such as body joints, reference languages, and ad hoc hierarchies. This study takes a fresh approach to comparative research on body partonymy by focusing on analogous relations between upper- and lower-body membership sets or “transverse analogous paradigms” (TAP), hypothesizing that most world languages feature strong evidence of such relations. Focusing on upper and lower “limb” (arm/leg) relationships, I test this hypothesis on an original database of 50 world languages built from detailed lexicographic sources quota sampled for broad distribution in terms of physical geography, population size, and genetic linguistic diversity. The analysis operationalizes four degrees of evidence: transverse parallel conceptions, with or without arm/leg matching, followed by transverse colexifications, and transverse paradigm sets. Coding for these four degrees of evidence reveals moderate evidence for TAP in all languages sampled, with 76% (n = 38) showing comprehensive indices (four out of four degrees), an additional eleven (22%, 98% total) showing strong indices (three out of four degrees) and only one language showing modest evidence (two out of four degrees). Findings demonstrate the value of reorienting comparative body partonym studies to the intrinsic organization of upright posture itself, with potentially broader implications for theorizing the cognitive foundations of grammar and the origins of advanced conceptual blending.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1932401</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1932401</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Cross-linguistic variation in the detection of conversational click sounds]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-10-01T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Brief Research Report</category>
        <author>Kyle Seakgwa</author><author>Sharon Peperkamp</author><author>Derrin Pinto</author><author>Donny Vigil</author><author>Emmanuel Chemla</author>
        <description><![CDATA[There are two types of click sounds that have been studied in linguistics. The first are those that form part of the consonant inventory of certain African languages, such as Zulu and Xhosa. In these languages, clicks are used phonemically. The second group of click sounds exist in many - if not all - languages, but they are used paralinguistically, that is, they convey pragmatic and discursive functions. For example, a click can convey exasperation, surprise, or the idea that the speaker is searching for what to say. Although these latter clicks are common, it is not clear to what extent speakers are aware of them. Vigil and Pinto (2020) found that English speakers are hardly able to detect paralinguistic clicks in stretches of semi-spontaneous speech. The present study uses the same paradigm and stimuli in an online setting, and tests both native English speakers and multilingual speakers of English and one or more click languages. The results show that people who grew up speaking a click-based language are better than English speakers at spotting some of these paralinguistic clicks.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1974917</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1974917</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Mapping the functional dynamics of language control and executive functions in the bilingual brain with magnetoencephalography]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-09-28T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Mini Review</category>
        <author>Xinyu Liu</author><author>Ümit Aydin</author><author>Christos Pliatsikas</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Bilingualism has been associated with differences in brain function and organization, although findings remain inconsistent. This review examines magnetoencephalography (MEG) as a method that contributes to understanding the neural implementation of language control and executive functions in bilinguals. By directly measuring neural activity with millisecond temporal resolution, MEG can reveal the timing, spatial distribution, and frequency-specific dynamics of such processes. Task-based MEG studies have identified bilingualism-related neural differences during language control and non-verbal executive-control tasks, including cases in which bilinguals and monolinguals show comparable behavioral performance. Resting-state studies have further revealed differences in functional connectivity and large-scale network topology in related networks which are associated with bilingual experiences. Together, these findings demonstrate the value of MEG for characterizing bilingualism-related differences in both task-evoked control processes and intrinsic brain organization. As such, MEG emerges as a method that could help refine neurocognitive theories of the effects of bilingualism on the brain.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1934991</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1934991</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Bilingual parent–child dyads' language use and code-switching during shared reading: exploring variations across labeling and word explanations]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-09-28T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Dilman Nomat</author><author>Veslemøy Rydland</author><author>Vibeke Grøver</author>
        <description><![CDATA[IntroductionShared reading offers an important context for supporting young children's language development. However, limited research has investigated shared reading interactions in bilingual parent-child dyads, particularly using naturalistic observations.MethodsThe present study explored language use and code-switching (i.e., the alternating use of languages) of bilingual preschool-aged children and their parents during shared reading of a wordless picture book at home. Using naturalistic observational data from 151 parent-child dyads in Norway, we focused on variations across two types of talk with potential to support children's word understanding: labeling and word explanation.ResultsWe found that dyads who primarily read in their first language, compared to those who primarily read in their second language, engaged more frequently in labeling but not in word explanations. Additionally, we found that parents code-switched more often during word explanations than during labeling, irrespective of which language they primarily used for reading.DiscussionOverall, these findings offer new insights into bilingual parent-child shared reading at home by illustrating systematic differences in dyads' use of labeling and in parents' use of code-switching between labeling and word explanations.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1792224</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1792224</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Enduring cognate facilitation: evidence for form-based transfer in bilingual word recognition]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-09-24T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Evy Woumans</author><author>Wouter Duyck</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Cognates are words that share meaning across languages alongside all or most of their orthography. They are generally processed faster than control words, an effect known as cognate facilitation. The current study set out to investigate whether long-term cognate facilitation in a multi-day practice paradigm is driven by shared mental representations or graded cross-linguistic similarity effects. Dutch-English participants completed a visual lexical decision paradigm over five consecutive days, with testing on the first and fifth day in one language (L1 or L2) and practice on the intervening days in the other language. Target words included identical and non-identical cognates, non-cognate translation equivalents, controls, and non-words. While results showed a robust procedural practice effect across all word types, both identical and non-identical cognates exhibited a significantly larger cross-linguistic performance transfer than translation equivalents and control words. Crucially, the transfer effects for identical and non-identical cognates did not statistically diverge, and no additional transfer was observed for purely semantic translation equivalents. These patterns suggest that shared semantic representations alone cannot account for enduring cognate facilitation. Rather than proving isolated shared structural representations, the findings demonstrate that cross-linguistic transfer in visual word recognition is heavily modulated by graded form-based similarity, reflecting tightly coupled orthographic and phonological processing pathways.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1688982</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1688982</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Semantic labeling with fulfillers in multilingual contexts]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-09-16T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Kiran Pala</author><author>Vasudevan Nedumpozhimana</author><author>S. Shalu</author><author>Punam Silu</author><author>Kamal Kumar Choudhary</author>
        <description><![CDATA[This article introduces a novel approach to semantic labeling grounded in the fulfiller concept—a cognitive-semantic theory that highlights the role of absent but contextually inferred elements in meaning construction. We argue that the prevailing semantic labeling practices often neglect this essential aspect of meaning, especially in typologically diverse languages where semantic roles may be implicit, elided, or heavily reliant on contextual inference. Drawing on a small pilot multilingual corpus, we undertake a qualitative, manually annotated study to identify and classify fulfillers—semantic roles that are not overtly expressed but are grammatically, discursively, or culturally implied. Our analysis focuses on languages with pro-drop characteristics, argument ellipsis, and context-dependent expression, revealing systematic patterns in how meaning is fulfilled through absence. The findings suggest that accounting for fulfillers can deepen our understanding of cross-linguistic variation in argument realization and semantic structure. The authors discuss the implications for typological theory, annotation methodology, and potential future integration into computational models. This work opens a new direction in semantic labeling by foregrounding the cognitive and typological relevance of semantic absences.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1813257</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1813257</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Narrative point of view as an instructional variable in English reading classrooms: Differential patterns of multidimensional reading performance]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-09-09T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Jagdeep Panchal</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Narrative point of view is a feature of narrative texts, yet its role as a text characteristic in English language teaching remains insufficiently understood. This study examined whether first-person and third-person omniscient narration were associated with differential patterns of multidimensional reading performance among upper-primary English language learners. Drawing on a framework distinguishing processing-oriented dimensions from comprehension-oriented outcomes, the study investigated performance across Inferential Processing, Structural Coherence Processing, Micro-Level Comprehension, and Macro-Level Comprehension. A classroom-based quasi-experimental design was employed with 115 Grade 4 and Grade 5 learners. Using a counterbalanced design, participants completed reading tasks under first-person and third-person omniscient narration conditions. Reading performance was assessed through a multidimensional framework and analyzed using mixed-design analyses of variance. The findings revealed a significant overall effect of narration condition, with third-person omniscient narration associated with a modest advantage in composite reading performance. Significant interactions also emerged across assessment dimensions. First-person narration was associated with stronger Inferential Processing and Micro-Level Comprehension, whereas third-person omniscient narration was associated with stronger Structural Coherence Processing and Macro-Level Comprehension. A significant interaction between narration condition and grade level indicated that developmental differences were expressed differently across narrative contexts. The findings suggest that narrative point of view may represent a meaningful component of text design associated with differential patterns of multidimensional reading performance. By distinguishing processing-oriented dimensions from comprehension-oriented outcomes, the study contributes to a nuanced understanding of how narrative perspective relates to reading performance among English language learners and highlights the relevance of narrative design in reading contexts.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1929126</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1929126</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Convergence between AI chatbot-calculated microstructure measures and SALT analysis of child language samples]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-09-07T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Richy Lewis Hayes</author><author>Pui Fong Kan</author>
        <description><![CDATA[This study examined the association and agreement between microstructure calculations from four large language model (LLM) chatbots and those generated by Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) software. Eighty-four typically developing children (35 girls; ages 2–9) participated, with 30 Japanese-English bilinguals and 54 English monolinguals. Narrative language samples were collected and coded with SALT conventions. Transcripts were randomly ordered and analyzed using two prompts. Using a general prompt, transcripts were entered into each LLM chatbot (ChatGPT, Copilot, MagicSchool, and Gemini), microstructure outputs were recorded, then the process was repeated with the same order using the more specific prompt. Results showed that across LLM chatbots, measures requiring relatively simple word or morpheme counts (MLUw, MLUm, NTW, NDW) generally exhibited stronger associations with SALT than the subordination index (SI), which showed greater variability. While intraclass correlation coefficients within measures were more variable, association and agreement coefficients were generally consistent with each other. Children's age and language backgrounds were associated with differences in the magnitude of some LLM–SALT coefficients. Finally, prompt specificity did not strengthen microstructure calculations for any of the LLM chatbots. Findings provide preliminary methodological evidence that some SALT-calculated microstructure measures may be more amenable to LLM chatbot-assisted calculation than others, with substantial associations and generally strong agreement observed for several measures; however, due to the exploratory nature of the current study, their clinical utility, decision-level accuracy, and workflow implications require further investigation.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1879834</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1879834</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Pragmatic multifunctionality of Indonesian swearing in google play app reviews: a mixed-method corpus study]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-09-03T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Ratna Soraya</author><author>Nurlela Nurlela</author><author>T. Thyrhaya Zein</author><author> Prihantoro</author><author>Mulyadi Mulyadi</author><author>Mahriyuni Mahriyuni</author>
        <description><![CDATA[BackgroundSwearing in digital communication is conventionally viewed as a straightforward marker of offensiveness, but its pragmatic value is systematically reshaped by platform norms, interactional goals, and sociocultural inference, challenging the adequacy of binary offensive-language models.MethodsThis study adopts a mixed-method corpus-pragmatic design to examine Indonesian swearing in Google Play comments from League of Legends: Wild Rift, Netflix, and X/Twitter, using lexicon-based detection across 500,599 non-empty comments, keyword-in-context interpretation, and contextual coding of six pragmatic categories: cognitive devaluation, animalized reference, corporeal taboo, death/dirt/disgust, moral abuse, and expletive intensification.ResultsIndonesian digital swearing performs catharsis, complaint, humor, solidarity, evaluative intensification, and ideological stance-taking, showing it is not reducible to aggression; platform differences are systematic, with gaming reviews foregrounding competence-based blame and cathartic release, streaming reviews concentrating service dissatisfaction and complaint intensification, and social-media reviews mobilizing public stance and identity positioning, while a Cohen's kappa of 0.3858 between lexicon-based and contextual detection confirms that lexical detection alone cannot explain pragmatic force.ConclusionThe study contributes a culturally situated, data-grounded model for interpreting Indonesian digital swearing beyond binary offensive-language classification and offers practical implications for platform-sensitive annotation, sentiment analysis, and content moderation.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1798627</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1798627</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Neural connectivity changes related to vocabulary knowledge effects during second language comprehension]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-08-26T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Brief Research Report</category>
        <author>Takara Kenza Allal-Sumoto</author><author>Hiroaki Mizuhara</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Vocabulary knowledge is a key factor of second language listening success. Our previous behavioral and electrophysiological studies showed faster processing for sentences containing vocabulary with productive knowledge, accompanied by changes in neural activity during sentence listening tasks. However, it is still unclear how vocabulary knowledge shapes functional connectivity across regions during online comprehension. To address this issue, we estimated phase-based connectivity using the weighted phase lag index, identified between level subnetworks with the Network-Based Statistic, and examined whether vocabulary-level effects emerge as changes in overall network strength, clustered organization, or bridging roles. Connectivity differences were most consistent for productive knowledge, appearing mainly as localized increases in bridging or intermediary roles rather than as broad increases in within-module hubness. However, none of these differences survived family-wise correction, and the findings are best treated as exploratory targets for confirmatory replication.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1782730</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1782730</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Toward linguistically-fair screening and assessment of primary progressive aphasia: a transdiagnostic approach for understudied and minority languages]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-08-21T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Opinion</category>
        <author>Mohamed Taiebine</author>
        <description></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1911194</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1911194</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Identification of consonant length in L2 Italian: the role of cross-linguistic influence]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-08-21T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Andrea Pešková</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Italian contrasts singleton and geminate consonants, a distinction that often poses difficulties for second language (L2) learners. The present study examines how first-language (L1) background shapes the perception of Italian consonant length by comparing learners from five linguistic backgrounds. A total of 104 adult learners of Italian (Finnish, Czech, German, Slovak, Spanish) and 21 L1 Italian listeners as a control group completed a perception identification task with 54 pseudowords controlled for consonant type and stress position. Participants categorized each auditory stimulus by selecting between the singleton and geminate orthographic response options (e.g., sàppolo vs. sàpolo). The results reveal high overall identification accuracy (81%), but substantial differences across learner groups. Learners whose L1 encodes consonantal and/or vocalic quantity contrasts (Finnish, Czech, Slovak) produced identification patterns closer to those of Italian listeners, while learners from languages without systematic length contrasts (Spanish, German) showed less accuracy. The observed hierarchy of accuracy confirms the importance of cross-linguistic influence in the perception of duration-based contrasts. While stress position and proficiency played more limited roles, consonant type also influenced performance. In particular, sonorants were identified more accurately than obstruents, and several consonant-specific tendencies reflected differences in the learners' L1 phonological inventories. A comparison with a previous discrimination study, conducted with the same participants, revealed higher accuracy in identification across all groups, suggesting that identification performance reflects phonological categorization processes and may additionally have been facilitated by the written responses available during the task. The findings highlight the role of cross-linguistic influence in the perception of Italian consonant length and contribute to a broader understanding of how L2 learners map continuous acoustic variation onto phonological categories.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1872761</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1872761</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Familiarity and literal plausibility, not transparency, drive idiom comprehension in adult readers with low literacy skills in Easy German]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-08-11T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Lena Wieland</author><author>Ingo Reich</author>
        <description><![CDATA[IntroductionEasy German (Leichte Sprache) is a rule-guided variety of German intended to increase the accessibility of written information for people with cognitive disabilities and adults with low literacy skills. Although existing guidelines often discourage the use of idioms, experimental evidence on idiom processing in these target groups remains scarce. We investigated how literacy, functional familiarity, transparency, and literal plausibility jointly shape idiom comprehension and preferences in adult low-literacy readers.MethodsIn a norming study with literate German speakers (Experiment 1; Prolific; 71 verb-phrase idioms), we obtained seven-point ratings of transparency and literal plausibility (reverse-coded so that higher values indicate a more plausible literal scene) and selected 24 idioms to instantiate a 2 × 2 design (high/low transparency × high/low plausibility). Literacy in the target group was assessed with otu.lea (Experiment 2) and transformed into a quasi-continuous index (0–100). In Experiment 3 (no context), 30 low-literacy adults explained each idiom, providing a measure of functional familiarity. In Experiment 4 (same cohort after ~6 months; n = 26), idioms were embedded in Easy German contexts and tested using an endorsement task (idiom vs. paraphrase vs. distractor) and a ranking task (gold/silver/bronze).ResultsMixed-effects models showed that, in Experiment 3, figurative accuracy increased with literacy (β = 0.028, p = 0.0019) and was related to literal plausibility (β = 0.569, p < 0.001), with a strong transparency × plausibility interaction (β = −1.457, p < 0.001): idioms that were both transparent and literally plausible yielded the lowest figurative accuracy. In Experiment 4, idiom endorsement was predicted by functional familiarity from Experiment 3 (β = 0.702, p = 0.025), while ranking responses showed robust distractor rejection and no reliable disadvantage for idioms relative to meaning-consistent paraphrases.DiscussionOverall, idiom accessibility in low-literacy adults appears to be driven primarily by literacy, functional familiarity, and literal-figurative competition indexed by plausibility, whereas transparency does not emerge as a reliable stand-alone facilitator. These findings challenge Easy German recommendations that prioritize transparency and instead support applied strategies centered on audience familiarity, low literal plausibility, and contextual or paraphrastic scaffolding.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1846406</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1846406</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Convergent representations of linguistic constructions in human and artificial neural systems]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-08-06T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Pegah Ramezani</author><author>Thomas Kinfe</author><author>Andreas Maier</author><author>Achim Schilling</author><author>Patrick Krauss</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Understanding how the brain processes linguistic constructions is a central challenge in cognitive neuroscience and linguistics. Recent computational studies have shown that artificial neural language models spontaneously develop internally differentiated representations of Argument Structure Constructions (ASCs), generating specific predictions about when and how construction-level information should emerge during language processing. The present study tests these predictions in human neural activity using electroencephalography (EEG). Data were recorded from 12 native English speakers, with 11 participants retained for all reported analyses after preprocessing. Construction-related activity was analyzed using time-frequency analysis, statistical feature extraction, and machine learning classification. The results reveal construction-specific neural signatures that emerge primarily at sentence-final positions, where argument structure information becomes fully disambiguated, and are most prominent in the alpha frequency band. Pairwise classification further demonstrated reliable differentiation between specific construction pairs, particularly ditransitive and resultative constructions, while other pairs exhibited overlapping neural signatures. Importantly, the temporal emergence and similarity structure of these neural effects closely mirror patterns previously observed in recurrent and transformer-based language models, in which constructional representations arise during integrative stages of processing. Together, these findings provide converging evidence that linguistic constructions are neurally encoded as distinct form-meaning mappings, supporting core assumptions of Construction Grammar and suggesting that both biological and artificial learning systems converge on similar representational solutions during predictive language processing. More broadly, this convergence is consistent with the idea that learning systems may discover stable regions within an underlying representational landscape - recently referred to as a Platonic representational space - that constrains which linguistic abstractions emerge as cognitively and computationally efficient forms.]]></description>
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        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1880735</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1880735</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Overaccommodating language toward older adults: an interpretation based on theories of communication accommodation and system justification]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-08-05T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Perspective</category>
        <author>Maria Àngels Viladot</author><author>Howard Giles</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Prior research on so-called “elderspeak” or patronizing talk directed at older adults—often interpreted by communication accommodation theory (CAT) as a classic example of “overaccommodation”—has shown that such communicative behaviors are viewed negatively by recipients and observers. However, we provide evidence suggesting that these evaluations are by no means uniform and may vary across contexts. To account for this variability, we draw on system justification theory to argue that attributions and evaluations of unfavorably delivered messages may, nonetheless, be accepted insofar as they align with internalized social norms and contribute to maintaining a coherent representation of the social order. We argue that this theoretical position, aligned with CAT, offers a more innovative and comprehensive way of understanding how intergenerational communication may reproduce age-based inequalities.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1845613</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1845613</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Lonely wallets: differences in comprehending anthropomorphic language in Japanese and English]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-07-30T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Franklin Chang</author><author>Tomoko Tatsumi</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Japanese speakers appear to use anthropomorphic language in a way that is different from English speakers (e.g., my wallet is lonely). Some of these expressions are not conventionalized, yet seem to be spontaneously produced. To test whether these types of anthropomorphic forms are readily understood, we presented English and Japanese readers with stories where the fourth sentence was either an anthropomorphic sentence or a literal sentence. In two experiments, English speakers found the anthropomorphic sentences to be more difficult to process than the literal sentences, but there was no difference in difficulty for the Japanese readers. The results are not explained by existing comprehension or personification theories but instead suggest that culture-specific conceptual factors can change comprehension processes in English and Japanese.]]></description>
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