EDITORIAL published: 22 October 2020 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.576244 Editorial: Approaches to Language: Data, Theory, and Explanation Ángel J. Gallego 1* and Aritz Irurtzun 2* 1 Department of Spanish Philology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, 2 CNRS, IKER (UMR 5478), Bayonne, France Keywords: language, data, theory, description, analysis Editorial on the Research Topic Approaches to Language: Data, Theory, and Explanation This Research Topic serves as a showroom for the latest developments in linguistic methods and approaches. In so doing, the articles go beyond developing a specific research problem and they also serve as a sample of the kind of methods employed in different approaches to language, in the hope that this discussion prompts a reflection on the relation between theory, data, evidence, and explanation. Madariaga’s article is a clear vindication of the role of different factors shaping languages. It takes an I-language perspective in order to explain certain phenomena that are otherwise unapproachable such as the variation in object case marking of several Russian verbs. Ezeizabarrena and Garcia Fernandez analyze the feasibility and utility of words or morphemes as measures for (morpho-)syntactic development in agglutinative languages such as Basque, confirming their reliability for identifying developmental patterns. Theodorou et al. provide a pioneering analysis of sentence repetition tasks as useful tools for assessing children’s language ability in bilectal settings. The study validates the diagnostic accuracy Edited and reviewed by: Yury Y. Shtyrov, of the task, showing that it has the potential to be used as a referral criterion to identify children Aarhus University, Denmark with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). *Correspondence: Leivada et al. advance in the demarcation of the linguistic phenotype of three developmental Ángel J. Gallego disorders: SLI, Down syndrome, and autism spectrum disorder. They perform a systematic angel.gallego@uab.cat and cross-linguistic review of their linguistic profiles and formulate the Locus Preservation Aritz Irurtzun Hypothesis, suggesting that aspects of the language faculty are immune to impairment across aritz.irurtzun@iker.cnrs.fr developmental disorders. Various experimental studies address the processing of long-distance dependencies. Santesteban Specialty section: et al. study whether antecedent-clitic dependencies in Spanish are computed like agreement or This article was submitted to like pronominal dependencies. They report two experiments arguing for cue-retrieval accounts Language Sciences, of dependency resolution and suggesting that the sensitivity to attraction effects shown by clitics a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology resembles more the computation of pronominal dependencies than that of agreement. Likewise, Sauermann and Gagarina report a visual world eye-tracking study investigating the impact of the Received: 25 June 2020 word order and grammatical role parallelism on the online comprehension of pronouns in German. Accepted: 15 September 2020 Published: 22 October 2020 It provides compelling evidence that pronouns may not in general be associated with the subject or topic of a sentence but that their resolution is modulated by additional factors. Citation: Gallego ÁJ and Irurtzun A (2020) In a different setting, Pablos et al. present some experiments on the processing of long-distance Editorial: Approaches to Language: backward dependencies in Dutch and the processing of in-situ wh-questions in Mandarin vs. Data, Theory, and Explanation. French. This is also a study that provides a general reflection on the challenges that experimental Front. Psychol. 11:576244. work faces in finding a compromise between addressing theoretically relevant questions and being doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.576244 able to implement them in a controlled experimental paradigm. Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1 October 2020 | Volume 11 | Article 576244 Gallego and Irurtzun Editorial: Approaches to Language On the more theoretical prism, Medeiros centers on Oltra-Massuet et al. present the results of a structural priming design properties of language, proposing a Universal Linear experiment where they test two different theoretical approaches Transduction Reactive Automaton (ULTRA) directly mapping to the argument structure of (in)transitive structures. The study surface word orders to underlying base structure with a stack- suggests a stronger predictive contribution of a model that sorting algorithm. supports an interpretive semantics view of syntax. Taking a historical and epistemological stance, Ott asks for a Vogelzang et al. analyze how language processing interacts paced consideration of the implications of “strong generativity” with general cognitive resources by reviewing different language in the field, and its relation to data, judgments, and their processing models. relationship with theoretical evidence. Ohta et al. explore the hypothesis that topicalization and D’Alessandro and van Oostendorp provide an even bigger scrambling constructions are quite different in nature. They set picture by addressing directly broad ontological questions about up an experiment to assess the modular nature of these structures our object of study and epistemological questions about how in Kaqchikel Mayan by identifying their main processing loci. to best study it. The position that they defend is a plural Finally, Gong et al. report an artificial language learning one, vindicating the necessity of different disciplines, views and experiment studying whether hierarchies in perceptual saliency methodologies when studying language. influence the learning of orders regulating adjectives of involved Quer and Steinbach analyze the impact of modality on visual features. Their results show learning biases for orders that linguistic data elicitation and collection, corpus studies, are congruent with the perceptual saliency hierarchy, which could and experimental studies highlighting a set of specific contribute to the structural configuration of languages. challenges for sign language research. This paper also In a nutshell, this Research Topic offers a wide panoramic vindicates the complementarity of theoretical approaches view of different stances and approaches to language and shows and experimental studies. how the interaction of a robust theoretical apparatus, plus Duguine proposes a new model for null subjects, and focuses the application of cutting-edge data acquisition and analysis on its implications for language development. The paper explores techniques can help us move forward in the understanding of a the consequences of an inverse approach to pro-drop in the phenomenon as complex and poliedric as natural language. domain of language acquisition, arguing that it allows to account for a number of properties of child languages. AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS Do and Kaiser analyze syntactic satiation effects. Their experimental analysis of Subject island and Complex-NP All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual Constraint violations uncovers different factors that may bring contribution to the work, and approved it for publication. about satiation, and the overall conclusion is that satiation may not be a one-size-fit-all phenomenon for different types FUNDING of structures. Bader centers on the processing of center embedding This research has been partially supported by grants from constructions in German. As a result of the discussion of the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (FFI2017-87140- the three novel experiments he reports, he argues for a C4-1-P; PGC2018-096870-B-I00), the Generalitat de Catalunya multifactorial account of the limitations on center embedding in (2017SGR634), the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis natural languages. Avançats (ICREA Acadèmia 2015), and the Agence Nationale de Giannakidou and Etxeberria review a series of experimental la Recherche (UV2 ANR18-FRAL0006 (ANR-DFG); BIM ANR- studies that address complex judgments involving integration 17-CE27-0011). from multiple levels of grammatical representation. They Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the show the welcome results of the combination of theoretical absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a research and experimental techniques when addressing such potential conflict of interest. complex phenomena as NPI licensing or the emergence of scalar readings. Copyright © 2020 Gallego and Irurtzun. This is an open-access article distributed Zhan also provides a nice example of the usefulness of under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original experimental methods (eye-tracking) when addressing questions author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication such as how and when scalar and ignorance inferences are in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, computed in disjunction phrases. distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 2 October 2020 | Volume 11 | Article 576244