@article{HoehleBergerMuelleretal.2009, author = {H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Berger, Frauke and M{\"u}ller, Anja and Schmitz, Michaela and Weissenborn, J{\"u}rgen}, title = {Focus particles in children's language : production and comprehension of auch "also" in German learners from 1 year to 4 years of age}, issn = {1048-9223}, doi = {10.1080/10489220802584550}, year = {2009}, language = {en} } @misc{HoehleWeissenbornKieferetal.2004, author = {H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Weissenborn, J{\"u}rgen and Kiefer, Dorothea and Schulz, Antje and Schmitz, Michaela}, title = {Functional elements in infants' speech processing : the role of determiners in the syntactic categorization of lexical elements}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-16285}, year = {2004}, abstract = {How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words. Evidence from the head-turn preference paradigm shows that, although 12- to 13-month-olds cannot do this, 14- to 16-month-olds are able to use a determiner to categorize a following novel word as a noun. In contrast, no categorization effect was found for a novel word following a subject pronoun. To understand this difference we analyzed adult child-directed speech. This analysis showed that there are in fact stronger co-occurrence relations between determiners and nouns than between subject pronouns and verbs. Thus, in German determiners may be more reliable cues to the syntactic category of an adjacent novel word than are subject pronouns. We propose that the capacity to syntactically categorize novel words, demonstrated here for the first time in children this young, mediates between the recognition of the specific morphosyntactic frame in which a novel word appears and the word-to-world mapping that is needed to build up a semantic representation for the novel word.}, language = {en} } @article{MuellerHoehleSchmitzetal.2009, author = {M{\"u}ller, Anja and H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Schmitz, Michaela and Weissenborn, J{\"u}rgen}, title = {Information structural constraints on children's early language production : the acquisition of the focus particle "auch" (also) in German learning 12-to 36-month-olds}, issn = {0142-7237}, year = {2009}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Schmitz2008, author = {Schmitz, Michaela}, title = {The perception of clauses in 6- and 8-month-old German-learning infants : influence of pause duration and the natural pause hierarchy}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-29078}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, year = {2008}, abstract = {The present dissertation focuses on the question whether and under which conditions infants recognise clauses in fluent speech and the role a prosodic marker such as a pause may have in the segmentation process. In the speech signal, syntactic clauses often coincide with intonational phrases (IPhs) (Nespor \& Vogel, 1986, p. 190), the boundaries of which are marked by changes in fundamental frequency (e.g., Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Hufnagel \& Fong, 1991), lengthening of the final syllable (e.g., Cooper \& Paccia-Cooper, 1980) and the occurrence of a pause (Nespor \& Vogel, 1986, p. 188). Thus, IPhs seem to be reliably marked in the speech stream and infants may use these cues to recognise them. Furthermore, corpus studies on the occurrence and distribution of pauses have revealed that there is a strong correlation between the duration of a pause and the type of boundary it marks (e.g., Butcher, 1981, for German). Pauses between words are either non-existent or short, pauses between phrases are a bit longer, and pauses between clauses and at sentence boundaries further increase in duration. This suggests the existence of a natural pause hierarchy that complements the prosodic hierarchy described by Nespor and Vogel (1986). These hierarchies on the side of the speech signal correspond to the syntactic hierarchy of a language. In the present study, five experiments using the Headturn preference paradigm (Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk, Cassidy, Druss \& Kennedy, 1987) were conducted to investigate German-learning 6- and 8-month-olds' use of pauses to recognise clauses in the signal and their sensitivity to the natural pause hierarchy. Previous studies on English-learning infants' recognition of clauses (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987; Nazzi, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk \& Jusczyk, 2000) have found that infants as young as 6 months recognise clauses in fluent speech. Recently, Seidl and colleagues have begun to investigate the status the pause may have in this process (Seidl, 2007; Johnson \& Seidl, 2008; Seidl \& Cristi{\`a}, 2008). However, none of these studies investigated infants' sensitivity to the natural pause hierarchy and especially the sensitivity to the correlation between pause durations and the respective within-sentence clause boundaries / sentence boundaries. To address these questions highly controlled stimuli were used. In all five experiments the stimuli were sentences consisting of two IPhs which each coincided with a syntactic clause. In the first three experiments pauses were inserted either at clause and sentence boundaries or within the first clause and the sentence boundaries. The duration of the pauses varied between the experiments. The results show that German-learning 6-month-olds recognise clauses in the speech stream, but only in a condition in which the duration of the pauses conforms to the mean duration of pauses found at the respective boundaries in German. Experiments 4 and 5 explicitly addressed the question of infants' sensitivity to the natural pause hierarchy by inserting pauses at the clause and sentence boundaries only. Their durations were either conforming to the natural pause hierarchy or were being reversed. The results of these experiments provide evidence that 8-, but not 6-month-olds seem to be sensitive to the correlation of the duration of pauses and the type of boundary they demarcate. The present study provides first evidence that infants not only use pauses to recognise clause and sentence boundaries, but are sensitive to the duration and distribution of pauses in their native language as reflected in the natural pause hierarchy.}, language = {en} } @misc{HoehleSchmitzMuelleretal.2006, author = {H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Schmitz, Michaela and M{\"u}ller, Anja and Weissenborn, J{\"u}rgen}, title = {The recognition of discontinuous verbal dependencies by German 19-month-olds : evidence for lexical and structural influences on children's early processing capacities}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-16297}, year = {2006}, abstract = {Recent work has shown that English-learning 18-month-olds can detect the relationship between discontinuous morphemes such as is and -ing in Grandma is always running (Gomez, 2002; Santelmann \& Jusczyk, 1998) but only at a maximum of 3 intervening syllables. In this article we examine the tracking of discontinuous dependencies in children acquiring German. Due to freer word order, German allows for greater distances between dependent elements and a greater syntactic variety of the intervening elements than English does. The aim of this study was to investigate whether factors other than distance may influence the child's capacity to recognize discontinuous elements. Our findings provide evidence that children's recognition capacities are affected not only by distance but also by their ability to linguistically analyze the material intervening between the dependent elements. We speculate that this result supports the existence of processing mechanisms that reduce a discontinuous relation to a local one based on subcategorization relations.}, language = {en} } @article{SchmitzHoehleMuelleretal.2006, author = {Schmitz, Michaela and H{\"o}hle, Barbara and M{\"u}ller, Anja and Weissenborn, J{\"u}rgen}, title = {The recognition of the prosodic focus position in German-Learning Infants from 4 to 14 Months}, year = {2006}, language = {en} } @article{SchmitzHoehleMuelleretal.2006, author = {Schmitz, Michaela and H{\"o}hle, Barbara and M{\"u}ller, Anja and Weissenborn, J{\"u}rgen}, title = {The recognition of the prosodic focus position in German-learning infants from 4 to 14 months}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19566}, year = {2006}, abstract = {The aim of the present study was to elucidate in a study with 4-, 6-, 8-, and 14-month-old German-learning children, when and how they may acquire the regularities which underlie Focus-to-Stress Alignment (FSA) in the target language, that is, how prosody is associated with specific communicative functions. Our findings suggest, that 14-month-olds have already found out that German allows for variable focus positions, after having gone through a development which goes from a predominantly prosodically driven processing of the input to a processing where prosody interacts more and more with the growing lexical and syntactic knowledge of the child.}, language = {en} }