This work investigates how a multilingual transformer model represents morphosyntactic properties of questions. We introduce the Question Type and Complexity (QTC) dataset with sentences across seven languages, annotated with type information and complexity metrics including dependency length, tree depth, and lexical density. Our evaluation extends probing methods to regression labels with selectivity controls to quantify gains in generalizability. We compare layer-wise probes on frozen Glot500-m (Imani et al., 2023) representations against subword TF-IDF baselines, and a fine-tuned model. Results show that statistical features classify questions effectively in languages with explicit marking, while neural probes capture fine-grained structural complexity patterns better. We use these results to evaluate when contextual representations outperform statistical baselines and whether parameter updates reduce the availability of pre-trained linguistic information.

This study examines whether sentence-level memory load in comprehension is better explained by linear proximity between syntactically related words or by the structural density of the intervening material. Building on locality-based accounts and cross-linguistic evidence for dependency length minimization, the work advances Intervener Complexity-the number of intervening heads between a head and its dependent-as a structurally grounded lens that refines linear distance measures. Using harmonized dependency treebanks and a mixed-effects framework across multiple languages, the analysis jointly evaluates sentence length, dependency length, and Intervener Complexity as predictors of the Memory-load measure. Studies in Psycholinguistics have reported the contributions of feature interference and misbinding to memory load during processing. For this study, I operationalized sentence-level memory load as the linear sum of feature misbinding and feature interference for tractability; current evidence does not establish that their cognitive contributions combine additively. All three factors are positively associated with memory load, with sentence length exerting the broadest influence and Intervener Complexity offering explanatory power beyond linear distance. Conceptually, the findings reconcile linear and hierarchical perspectives on locality by treating dependency length as an important surface signature while identifying intervening heads as a more proximate indicator of integration and maintenance demands. Methodologically, the study illustrates how UD-based graph measures and cross-linguistic mixed-effects modelling can disentangle linear and structural contributions to processing efficiency, providing a principled path for evaluating competing theories of memory load in sentence comprehension.

How is the limited capacity of working memory efficiently used to support human linguistic behaviors? In this paper, we investigate strategic resource allocation as an efficiency principle for memory encoding in sentence processing. The idea is that working memory resources are dynamically and strategically allocated to prioritize novel and unexpected information, enhancing their representations to make them less susceptible to memory decay and interference. Theoretically, from a resource-rational perspective, we argue that this efficiency principle naturally arises from two functional assumptions about working memory, namely, its limited capacity and its noisy representation. Empirically, through naturalistic corpus data, we find converging evidence for strategic resource allocation in the context of dependency locality from both the production and the comprehension side, where non-local dependencies with less predictable antecedents are associated with reduced locality effect. However, our results also reveal considerable cross-linguistic variability, highlighting the need for a closer examination of how strategic resource allocation, as a universal efficiency principle, interacts with language-specific phrase structures.

Previous work has shown that isolated non-canonical sentences with Object-before-Subject (OSV) order are initially harder to process than their canonical counterparts with Subject-before-Object (SOV) order. Although this difficulty diminishes with appropriate discourse context, the underlying cognitive factors responsible for alleviating processing challenges in OSV sentences remain a question. In this work, we test the hypothesis that dependency length minimization is a significant predictor of non-canonical (OSV) syntactic choices, especially when controlling for information status such as givenness and surprisal measures. We extract sentences from the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus (HUTB) that contain clearly-defined subjects and objects, systematically permute the preverbal constituents of those sentences, and deploy a classifier to distinguish between original corpus sentences and artificially generated alternatives. The classifier leverages various discourse-based and cognitive features, including dependency length, surprisal, and information status, to inform its predictions. Our results suggest that, although there exists a preference for minimizing dependency length in non-canonical corpus sentences amidst the generated variants, this factor does not significantly contribute in identifying corpus sentences above and beyond surprisal and givenness measures. Notably, discourse predictability emerges as the primary determinant of constituent-order preferences. These findings are further supported by human evaluations involving 44 native Hindi speakers. Overall, this work sheds light on the role of expectation adaptation in word-ordering decisions. We conclude by situating our results within the theories of discourse production and information locality.

Dependency length minimization is a universally observed quantitative property of natural languages. However, the extent of dependency length minimization, and the cognitive mechanisms through which the language processor achieves this minimization remain unclear. This research offers mechanistic insights by postulating that moving a short preverbal constituent next to the main verb explains preverbal constituent ordering decisions better than global minimization of dependency length in SOV languages. This approach constitutes a least-effort strategy because it's just one operation but simultaneously reduces the length of all preverbal dependencies linked to the main verb. We corroborate this strategy using large-scale corpus evidence across all seven SOV languages that are prominently represented in the Universal Dependency Treebank. These findings align with the concept of bounded rationality, where decision-making is influenced by 'quick-yet-economical' heuristics rather than exhaustive searches for optimal solutions. Overall, this work sheds light on the role of bounded rationality in linguistic decision-making and language evolution.

While natural languages differ widely in both canonical word order and word order flexibility, their word orders still follow shared cross-linguistic statistical patterns, often attributed to functional pressures. In the effort to identify these pressures, prior work has compared real and counterfactual word orders. Yet one functional pressure has been overlooked in such investigations: the uniform information density (UID) hypothesis, which holds that information should be spread evenly throughout an utterance. Here, we ask whether a pressure for UID may have influenced word order patterns cross-linguistically. To this end, we use computational models to test whether real orders lead to greater information uniformity than counterfactual orders. In our empirical study of 10 typologically diverse languages, we find that: (i) among SVO languages, real word orders consistently have greater uniformity than reverse word orders, and (ii) only linguistically implausible counterfactual orders consistently exceed the uniformity of real orders. These findings are compatible with a pressure for information uniformity in the development and usage of natural languages.

The principle of DEPENDENCY LENGTH MINIMIZATION, which seeks to keep syntactically related words close in a sentence, is thought to universally shape the structure of human languages for effective communication. However, the extent to which dependency length minimization is applied in human language systems is not yet fully understood. Preverbally, the placement of long-before-short constituents and postverbally, short-before-long constituents are known to minimize overall dependency length of a sentence. In this study, we test the hypothesis that placing only the shortest preverbal constituent next to the main-verb explains word order preferences in Hindi (a SOV language) as opposed to the global minimization of dependency length. We characterize this approach as a least-effort strategy because it is a cost-effective way to shorten all dependencies between the verb and its preverbal dependencies. As such, this approach is consistent with the bounded-rationality perspective according to which decision making is governed by "fast but frugal" heuristics rather than by a search for optimal solutions. Consistent with this idea, our results indicate that actual corpus sentences in the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus are better explained by the least effort strategy than by global minimization of dependency lengths. Additionally, for the task of distinguishing corpus sentences from counterfactual variants, we find that the dependency length and constituent length of the constituent closest to the main verb are much better predictors of whether a sentence appeared in the corpus than total dependency length. Overall, our findings suggest that cognitive resource constraints play a crucial role in shaping natural languages.

Word order choices during sentence production can be primed by preceding sentences. In this work, we test the DUAL MECHANISM hypothesis that priming is driven by multiple different sources. Using a Hindi corpus of text productions, we model lexical priming with an n-gram cache model and we capture more abstract syntactic priming with an adaptive neural language model. We permute the preverbal constituents of corpus sentences, and then use a logistic regression model to predict which sentences actually occurred in the corpus against artificially generated meaning-equivalent variants. Our results indicate that lexical priming and lexically-independent syntactic priming affect complementary sets of verb classes. By showing that different priming influences are separable from one another, our results support the hypothesis that multiple different cognitive mechanisms underlie priming.

We test the hypothesis that discourse predictability influences Hindi syntactic choice. While prior work has shown that a number of factors (e.g., information status, dependency length, and syntactic surprisal) influence Hindi word order preferences, the role of discourse predictability is underexplored in the literature. Inspired by prior work on syntactic priming, we investigate how the words and syntactic structures in a sentence influence the word order of the following sentences. Specifically, we extract sentences from the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus (HUTB), permute the preverbal constituents of those sentences, and build a classifier to predict which sentences actually occurred in the corpus against artificially generated distractors. The classifier uses a number of discourse-based features and cognitive features to make its predictions, including dependency length, surprisal, and information status. We find that information status and LSTM-based discourse predictability influence word order choices, especially for non-canonical object-fronted orders. We conclude by situating our results within the broader syntactic priming literature.

For many centuries, the goal of linguistics has been to capture this capacity by a formal description--a grammar--consisting of a systematic set of rules and/or principles that determine which sentences are part of a given language and which are not (Bod, 2013). Over the years, these formal grammars have taken many forms but common to them all is the assumption that they capture the idealized linguistic competence of a native speaker/hearer, independent of any memory limitations or other non-linguistic cognitive constraints (Chomsky, 1965; Miller, 2000). These abstract formal descriptions have come to play a foundational role in the language sciences, from linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics (Hauser et al., 2002; Pinker, 2003) to computer science, engineering, and machine learning (Klein and Manning, 2003; Dyer et al., 2016; Gómez-Rodríguez et al., 2018). Despite evidence that processing difficulty underpins the unacceptability of certain sentences (Morrill, 2010; Hawkins, 2004), the cognitive independence assumption that is a defining feature of linguistic competence has not been examined in a systematic way using the tools of formal grammar. It is therefore unclear whether these supposedly idealized descriptions of language are free of non-linguistic cognitive constraints, such as memory limitations.