"HEGA": the Basque version of the PaBiQ parental questionnaire, for clinicians and educators working in the Basque multilingual environment.

In this paper, we investigate the relevance of using a parental questionnaire (HEGA) to gather information on children's language experience in Basque and early language development in order to better interpret language performance in that language. Both this questionnaire and use of language assessment in Basque are needed in the Basque Country, where multilingualism is well attested. The questionnaire was developed after the PaBiQ with additional questions meant to reflect the Basque context, notably its schooling linguistic model. The HEGA was administered to the parents of 186 bilingual children of the Northern Basque Country (age 4;2-9;1) whose language skills in Basque were assessed via a new test battery targeting different linguistic domains (HIGA). Several significant correlations were found between exposure to, and use of Basque and performance in lexical and morphosyntactic production and comprehension. Mixed-effect regression analyses revealed that language experience in Basque, and particularly the fact of being schooled entirely in Basque, were strong predictors of lexical and morphosyntactic outcomes. In contrast, phonological performance, as measured by nonword repetition, appeared to be less impacted by language experience in Basque. Finally, two children were identified as being at risk of language impairment, due to low language performance in Basque despite extended language experience. These results have important implications for clinicians and educators, in particular for detecting language difficulties in Basque-speaking bilingual children. They also show the need for assessing language abilities in Basque for children growing up in a solid Basque-speaking environment.

Assessing the Role of Experimental Evidence for Interface Judgment: Licensing of Negative Polarity Items, Scalar Readings, and Focus.

This paper reviews a series of experimental studies that address what we call "interface judgment," which is the complex judgment involving integration from multiple levels of grammatical representation such as the syntax-semantics and prosody-semantics interface. We first discuss the results from the ERP literature connected to NPI licensing in different languages, paying particular attention to the N400 and the P600 as neural correlates of this specific phenomenon and focusing on the study by Xiang et al. (2016). The results of this study show evidence that there are two distinct NPI licensing mechanisms, i.e., licensing and rescuing, in line with Giannakidou (1998, 2006). Then we discuss an acceptability judgment task on Greek NPIs which supports the negativity as a scale hypothesis (Zwarts, 1995, 1996; Giannakidou, 1998). For the semantics-prosody interface judgment, we discuss two types of findings on two different phenomena and languages: (i) the study by Giannakidou and Yoon (2016) on scalar and non-scalar NPIs in Greek and Korean, which serves as the foundation for Chatzikonstantinou's (2016) study of production data showing distinct prosodic properties in emphatic (scalar) and non-emphatic (non-scalar) Greek NPIs; (ii) a (production and perception) study by Etxeberria and Irurtzun (2015) on the prosodic disambiguation of the scalar/non-scalar readings of sentences containing the focus particle "ere" in Basque. The main conclusion of the paper is that experimental methods of the kind discussed in the paper are useful in establishing physical, quantitative correlates of interface judgment.

Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation.

Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the boundary of what falls outside the scope of grammar, investigations far more rarely take into consideration the possible interpretations of such sentences, perhaps because these interpretations are commonly prejudged as irrelevant or unreliable across speakers. In this paper we provide the results of two experiments in which participants had to make parallel acceptability and interpretation judgments of sentences presenting various types of negative dependencies in Basque and in two varieties of Spanish (Castilian Spanish and Basque Country Spanish). Our results show that acceptable sentences are uniformly assigned a single negation reading in the two languages. However, while unacceptable sentences consistently convey single negation in Basque, they are interpreted at chance in both varieties of Spanish. These results confirm that judgment data that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable negative utterances can inform us not only about an adult's grammar of his/her particular language but also about interesting cross-linguistic differences. We conclude that the acceptability and interpretation of (un)grammatical negative sentences can serve linguistic theory construction by helping to disentangle basic assumptions about the nature of various negative dependencies.

The emergence of scalar meanings.

This paper analyzes the emergence of scalar additive meanings. We show that in Basque the same particle ere can obtain both the "simple additive" reading (akin to English too) and the "scalar additive" reading (akin to English even) but we argue that we do not have to distinguish two types of ere. We provide evidence, by means of a production and a perception experiment, that the reading is disambiguated by means of prosody (the placement of nuclear stress), which is a correlate of focus. We argue that the scalarity effect is generated by the combination of two presuppositions (a focus-induced one and a lexical one) and the assertion of the sentence.