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Human linguistic units are hierarchical, and our brain responds differently when processing linguistic units during sentence comprehension, especially when the modality of the received signal is different (auditory, visual, or audio-visual). However, it is unclear how the brain processes and integrates language information at different linguistic units (words, phrases, and sentences) provided simultaneously in audio and visual modalities. To address the issue, we presented participants with sequences of short Chinese sentences through auditory or visual or combined audio- visual modalities, while electroencephalographic responses were recorded. With a frequency tagging approach, we analyzed the neural representations of basic linguistic units (i.e., characters/monosyllabic words) and higher-level linguistic structures (i.e., phrases and sentences) across the three modalities separately. We found that audio-visual integration occurs at all linguistic units, and the brain areas involved in the integration varied across different linguistic levels. In particular, the integration of sentences activated the local left prefrontal area. Therefore, we used continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) to verify that the left prefrontal cortex plays a vital role in the audio-visual integration of sentence information. Our findings suggest the advantage of bimodal language comprehension at hierarchical stages in language-related information processing and provide evidence for the causal role of the left prefrontal regions in processing information of audio-visual sentences.

Cette contribution analyse les conditions sociolinguistiques structurantes de la fragilité psychosociale des jeunes Franco-Albertains. Trois contextes émergent : l’anglo-dominance, la relation ambivalente avec le Québec et la francophonie non traditionnelle issue des programmes d’immersion ou de l’immigration. L’analyse des données relatives à ces contextes, et en référence aux notions de hiérarchie linguistique et de fragilité psychosociale, révèle des sentiments ambigus de fragilité. Parallèlement à la fragilité, d’autres sentiments se manifestent chez les jeunes Franco-Albertains, telle la résistance qui apparaît comme leur compétence à surmonter l’adversité en s’inspirant de l’histoire de leur famille ou de leur groupe ethnique. Le recours à cette histoire révèle l’insuffisance des appuis psycho-sanitaires institutionnels. Ainsi, le théâtre des variations linguistiques, ou autrement dit, des niveaux de langage, entre jeunes en milieu franco-albertain illustre-il une problématique majeure, celle invitant à rechercher de nouveaux lieux socioculturels et sociolinguistiques de santé mentale., This paper analyzes the structuring sociolinguistic conditions of psychosocial fragility among Franco-Albertan youth. Three contexts emerge: Anglo-dominance; the ambivalent relationship with Quebec; and non-traditional Francophone space, stemming from immersion and immigration programs. An analysis of data on these contexts, and by referring to the concepts of linguistic hierarchy and psychosocial fragility, reveals ambiguous feelings of fragility. Alongside fragility, other feelings arise, like resistance that emerges as the ability to overcome adversity by drawing on the history of the family or ethnic group. These sources of support reveal inadequate institutional psychosocial support. Thus, is the presence of linguistic variations, or language levels, among Franco-Albertan youth illustrative of a major issue, that of identifying new sociocultural and sociolinguistic areas of mental health?

Resumen: Este trabajo pretende dar una visión general del reconocimiento de la diversidad lingüística española que se deriva de la Constitución. Nos referimos exclusivamente a las lenguas autóctonas históricamente habladas en España; teniendo en cuenta, además, que una misma lengua puede recibir diversas denominaciones populares y oficiales. Partiendo de estas premisas, el trabajo estudia el reconocimiento que hace la Constitución Española de la diversidad lingüística en España en su artículo 3. Se subraya en el estudio que, en dicho artículo de la Constitución se establece que el castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado y que todos los españoles tienen el deber de conocerla y el derecho a usarla (art. 3.1), que las otras lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas comunidades autónomas, en función de la regulación que hagan sus estatutos (art. 3.2) y que España considera que la riqueza de las diferentes modalidades lingüísticas es un patrimonio cultural que deberá tener un respeto y una protección especiales (art. 3.3). El contenido de la Constitución, la jurisprudencia constitucional de las últimas cuatro décadas y los estatutos de autonomía y legislación lingüística autonómica, han asentado un reconocimiento de la diversidad lingüística española y de los derechos lingüísticos concretos de los hablantes de las distintas lenguas españolas fundamentado en el principio de jerarquía lingüística y no en los de seguridad lingüística e igualdad de derechos lingüísticos. El principio de jerarquía lingüística presupone considerar que existen unas lenguas que deben tener un reconocimiento legal y oficial superior a otras. Y, lo que es lo mismo, que los derechos lingüísticos de sus hablantes no tienen el mismo grado de reconocimiento. Llegándose a dar el caso que, en España, una misma lengua pueda llegar a tener diferentes niveles de reconocimiento legal-oficial y un número aún mayor de políticas lingüísticas que traten de convertir en una realidad substantiva todos o una parte de los derechos lingüísticos reconocidos formalmente a los hablantes de una lengua diferente del castellano en una comunidad autónoma. Así las cosas, se constata que legalmente una lengua (castellano) tiene una situación de preeminencia legal-oficial, seis lenguas españolas (catalán, gallego, vasco, occitano, aragonés y asturleonés) tienen algún tipo de reconocimiento oficial en parte del territorio en el que son habladas de manera autóctona, una lengua tiene reconocimiento político (tamazight), otra tiene un reconocimiento administrativo menor en Cataluña (caló), y tres lenguas autóctonas no tienen el más mínimo reconocimiento legal, político o administrativo (árabe, haquetia y portugués). El trabajo estudia detalladamente y de manera global la estructuración de la jerarquía lingüística en la legislación española derivada de la Constitución y concluye con una descripción de los seis niveles de jerarquía lingüística y de derechos lingüísticos que existen en España. Se defiende, finalmente, un cambio sistema lingüístico legalconstitucional que respete los principios de seguridad lingüística y el principio de igualdad de derechos lingüísticos de todos los ciudadanos españoles. Summary: 1. Introduction. The Constitution and the Spanish languages. 2. Language in the statutes of monolingual communities. 3. Linguistic diversity in multilingual communities with a single official language. 4. Communities with co-officiality. 5. Final considerations: a hierarchical recognition. 6. Bibliography cited. Abstract: This paper is an overview of the recognition of the Spanish linguistic diversity derived from the Constitution. We refer exclusively to the native languages historically spoken in Spain; about that is important to know that the same language can receive diverse popular and official denominations. With these premises, the work studies the recognition in the article 3 of the Spanish Constitution of the linguistic diversity in Spain. It is emphasized in the study that this article establishes that the Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State and that all Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it (article 3.1), that the other Spanish languages would be official in the respective autonomous communities, depending on the regulation made by their statutes of autonomy (article 3.2 ), and that Spain considers the richness of the different linguistic modalities a cultural heritage that must have special respect and protection (article 3.3). The content of the Constitution, the constitutional jurisprudence of the last four decades and the statutes of autonomy and autonomous linguistic legislation, have established a recognition of the Spanish linguistic diversity and of the specific linguistic rights of the speakers of the different Spanish languages based on the principle of linguistic hierarchy and not in those of linguistic security and equality of linguistic rights. The principle of linguistic hierarchy considers that there are some languages that have to have a legal and official recognition superior to others. And, what is the same, that the linguistic rights of its speakers do not have the same degree of recognition. In Spain, the same language may have different levels of legal-official recognition and a lot of linguistic policies in the autonomous communities that try to be reality all or part of the linguistic rights formally recognized to speakers of a language other than Castilian. So it is verified that legally a language (Castilian) has a situation of legal-official preeminence, six Spanish languages (Catalan, Galician, Basque, Occitan, Aragonese and Asturian) have some type of official recognition in part of the territory where are spoken, one language has political recognition (Tamazight), another has a lower administrative recognition in Catalonia (Caló), and three indigenous languages do not have the least legal, political or administrative recognition (Arabic, Hachetia and Portuguese). The paper studies in detail the structure of the linguistic hierarchy in Spanish legislation derived from the Constitution and concludes with a description of the six levels of linguistic hierarchy and of linguistic rights that exist in Spain. Finally, it defends a legal-constitutional linguistic system that respects the principles of linguistic security and of equality of linguistic rights of all Spanish citizens.

This paper diachronically studies the decay of the agential preposition de and the subsequent spread of the preposition por in periphrastic passive constructions with ser. Besides presenting quantitative data on the distribution of both prepositions, several statistical analysis are performed to measure the influence of the nature of the passive agent on the selection of the preposition. The hypotheses tested in this part, based on different linguistic hierarchies, allow us to discover the contexts through which por extends its use at the expense of de., El presente trabajo constituye un estudio diacrónico acerca de la pérdida de la preposición de como introductora del complemento agente y la subsiguiente propagación de la preposición por en construcciones pasivas perifrásticas con ser. Además de presentar datos cuantitativos acerca de la distribución de ambas preposiciones, se llevan a cabo unos análisis estadísticos para medir la influencia de la naturaleza del agente pasivo sobre la selección de la preposición. Las hipótesis que se someten a prueba en esta parte, fundadas en distintas jerarquías lingüisticas, permiten descubrir a través de qué contextos por extiende su uso a expensas de de.

In decision making, a widely used methodology to manage unbalanced fuzzy linguistic informa- tion is the linguistic hierarchy (LH), which relies on a linguistic symbolic computational model based on ordinal 2-tuple linguistic representation. However, the ordinal 2-tuple linguistic approach does not exploit all advantages of Zadeh’s fuzzy linguistic approach to model uncertainty because the membership function shapes are ignored. Furthermore, the LH methodology is an indirect approach that relies on the uniform distribution of symmetric linguistic assessments. These draw- backs are overcome by applying a fuzzy methodology based on the implementation of the type-1 ordered weighted average (T1OWA) operator. The T1OWA operator is not a symbolic opera- tor and it allows to directly aggregate membership functions, which in practice means that the T1OWA methodology is suitable for both balanced and unbalanced linguistic contexts and with heterogeneous membership functions. Furthermore, the final output of the T1OWA methodology is always fuzzy and defined in the same domain of the original unbalanced fuzzy linguistic labels, which facilitates its interpretation via a visual joint representation. A case study is presented where the T1OWA operator methodology is used to assess the creditworthiness of European bonds based on real credit risk ratings of individual Eurozone member states modeled as unbalanced fuzzy linguistic labels., This research work has been supported by the research projects grants (TIN2013-40658-P and TIN2016- 75850-R) from the FEDER funds, and the University of Granada `Strengthening through Short-Visits' (Ref. GENIL-SSV 2015) programme.