@misc{BaerHenney2009,
  type      = {Master Thesis},
  author    = {Baer-Henney, Dinah},
  title     = {On natural and probabilisic effects during acquisition of morphophonemic alternations},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-36819},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2009},
  abstract  = {The acquisition of phonological alternations consists of many aspects as discussions in the relevant literature show. There are contrary findings about the role of naturalness. A natural process is grounded in phonetics; they are easy to learn, even in second language acquisition when adults have to learn certain processes that do not occur in their native language. There is also evidence that unnatural - arbitrary - rules can be learned. Current work on the acquisition of morphophonemic alternations suggests that their probability of occurrence is a crucial factor in acquisition. I have conducted an experiment to investigate the effects of naturalness as well as of probability of occurrence with 80 adult native speakers of German. It uses the Artificial Grammar paradigm: Two artificial languages were constructed, each with a particular alternation. In one language the alternation is natural (vowel harmony); in the other language the alternation is arbitrary (a vowel alternation depends on the sonorancy of the first consonant of the stem). The participants were divided in two groups, one group listened to the natural alternation and the other group listened to the unnatural alternation. Each group was divided into two subgroups. One subgroup then was presented with material in which the alternation occurred frequently and the other subgroup was presented with material in which the alternation occurred infrequently. After this exposure phase every participant was asked to produce new words during the test phase. Knowledge about the language-specific alternation pattern was needed to produce the forms correctly as the phonological contexts demanded certain alternants. The group performances have been compared with respect to the effects of naturalness and probability of occurrence. The natural rule was learned more easily than the unnatural one. Frequently presented rules were not learned more easily than the ones that were presented less frequently. Moreover, participants did not learn the unnatural rule at all, whether this rule was presented frequently or infrequently did not matter. There was a tendency that the natural rule was learned more easily if presented frequently than if presented infrequently, but it was not significant due to variability across participants.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{BrandtKobele2014,
  author    = {Brandt-Kobele, Oda-Christina},
  title     = {Comprehension of verb inflection in German-speaking children},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  isbn      = {978-3-86956-216-2},
  issn      = {1869-3822},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-62046},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {xx, 325},
  year      = {2014},
  abstract  = {Previous studies on the acquisition of verb inflection in normally developing children have revealed an astonishing pattern: children use correctly inflected verbs in their own speech but fail to make use of verb inflections when comprehending sentences uttered by others. Thus, a three-year old might well be able to say something like 'The cat sleeps on the bed', but fails to understand that the same sentence, when uttered by another person, refers to only one sleeping cat but not more than one. The previous studies that have examined children's comprehension of verb inflections have employed a variant of a picture selection task in which the child was asked to explicitly indicate (via pointing) what semantic meaning she had inferred from the test sentence. Recent research on other linguistic structures, such as pronouns or focus particles, has indicated that earlier comprehension abilities can be found when methods are used that do not require an explicit reaction, like preferential looking tasks. This dissertation aimed to examine whether children are truly not able to understand the connection the the verb form and the meaning of the sentence subject until the age of five years or whether earlier comprehension can be found when a different measure, preferential looking, is used. Additionally, children's processing of subject-verb agreement violations was examined. The three experiments of this thesis that examined children's comprehension of verb inflections revealed the following: German-speaking three- to four-year old children looked more to a picture showing one actor when hearing a sentence with a singular inflected verb but only when their eye gaze was tracked and they did not have to perform a picture selection task. When they were asked to point to the matching picture, they performed at chance-level. This pattern indicates asymmetries in children's language performance even within the receptive modality. The fourth experiment examined sensitivity to subject-verb agreement violations and did not reveal evidence for sensitivity toward agreement violations in three- and four-year old children, but only found that children's looking patterns were influenced by the grammatical violations at the age of five. The results from these experiments are discussed in relation to the existence of a production-comprehension asymmetry in the use of verb inflections and children's underlying grammatical knowledge.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Chen2022,
  author    = {Chen, Hui Ching},
  title     = {Acquisition of focus - in a cross-linguistic perspective},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-55345},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-553458},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {xiii, 130},
  year      = {2022},
  abstract  = {In dieser Dissertation untersuchen wir, wie chinesischen Muttersprachler und deutschen Muttersprachler, sowohl die Erwachsenen als auch die Kinder, verschiedene linguistische Mittel, wie z. B. Wortstellungsinformationen, prosodische und lexikalische Mittel im Sprachverst{\"a}ndnis korrekt interpretieren.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Fengler2016,
  author    = {Fengler, Anja},
  title     = {How the brain attunes to sentence processing},
  series = {MPI series in human cognitive and brain sciences ; 174},
  journal   = {MPI series in human cognitive and brain sciences ; 174},
  isbn      = {978-3-941504-59-2},
  pages     = {XVI, 208},
  year      = {2016},
  abstract  = {While children acquire new words and simple sentence structures extremely fast and without much effort, the ability to process complex sentences develops rather late in life. Although the conjoint occurrence between brain-structural and brain-functional changes, the decrease of plasticity, and changes in cognitive abilities suggests a certain causality between these processes, concrete evidence for the relation between brain development, language processing, and language performance is rare. Therefore, the current dissertation investigates the tripartite relationship between behavior (in the form of language performance and cognitive maturation as prerequisite for language processing), brain structure (in the form of gray matter maturation), and brain function (in the form of brain activation evoked by complex sentence processing). Previous developmental studies indicate a missing increase of activation in accordance to sentence complexity (functional selectivity) in language-relevant brain areas in children. To determine the factors contributing to the functional development of language-relevant brain areas, different methodologies and data acquisition techniques were used to investigate the processing of center-embedded sentences in 5- and 6-year-old children, 7- and 8-year-old children, and adults. Behavioral results indicate that children between 5 and 8 years show difficulties in processing double embedded sentences and that their performance for these type of sentences is positively correlated with digit span. In 7- and 8-year-old children, it was found that especially the processing of long-distance relations between the initial phrase and its corresponding verb appears to be associated with the subject's verbal working memory capacity. In contrast, children's performance for double embedded sentences in the younger age group positively correlated with their performance in a standardized sentence comprehension test. This finding supports the hypothesis that processing difficulties in this age group may be mainly attributed to difficulties in processing case marking information. These findings are discussed with respect to current accounts of language and working memory development. A second study aimed at investigating the structural maturation of brain areas involved in sentence comprehension. To do this, whole-brain magnetic resonance images from 59 children between 5 and 8 years were collected and children's gray matter was analyzed by using voxel-based morphometry. Children's grammatical proficiency was assessed by a standardized sentence comprehension test. A confirmatory factory analysis corroborated a grammar-relevant and a verbal working memory-relevant factor underlying the measured performance. While children's ability to assign thematic roles is positively correlated with gray matter probability (GMP) in the left inferior temporal gyrus and the left inferior frontal gyrus, verbal working memory-related performance is positively correlated with GMP in the left parietal operculum extending into the posterior superior temporal gyrus. These areas have been previously shown to be differentially engaged in adults' complex sentence processing. Thus, the findings of the second study suggest a specific correspondence between children's GMP in language-relevant brain regions and differential cognitive abilities which underlie complex sentence comprehension. In a third study, functional brain activity during the processing of center-embedded sentences was investigated in three different age groups (5-6 years, 7-8 years, and adults). Although all age groups engage a qualitatively comparable network of the left pars opercularis (PO), the left inferior parietal lobe extending into the posterior superior temporal gyrus (IPL/pSTG), the supplementary motor area (SMA) and the cerebellum, functional selectivity of these regions was only observable in adults. However, functional activation of the language-related regions (PO and IPL/pSTG) predicted sentence comprehension performance for all age groups. To solve the question of the complex interplay between different maturational factors, a fourth study analyzed the predictive power of gray matter probability, verbal working memory capacity, and behavioral differences in performance for simple and complex sentence for the functional selectivity of each activated region. These analyses revealed that the establishment of the adult-like functional selectivity for complex sentences is predicted by a reduction of the left PO's gray matter probability across age groups while that of the IPL/pSTG is additionally predicted by verbal working memory capacity. Taken all findings together, the current thesis provides evidence that both structural brain maturation and verbal working memory expansion provide the basis for the emergence of functional selectivity in language-related brain regions leading to more efficient sentence processing during development.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{Fengler2015,
  author    = {Fengler, Anja},
  title     = {How the brain attunes to sentence processing},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-85820},
  pages     = {XVI, 208},
  year      = {2015},
  abstract  = {While children acquire new words and simple sentence structures extremely fast and without much effort, the ability to process complex sentences develops rather late in life. Although the conjoint occurrence between brain-structural and brain-functional changes, the decrease of plasticity, and changes in cognitive abilities suggests a certain causality between these processes, concrete evidence for the relation between brain development, language processing, and language performance is rare. Therefore, the current dissertation investigates the tripartite relationship between behavior (in the form of language performance and cognitive maturation as prerequisite for language processing), brain structure (in the form of gray matter maturation), and brain function (in the form of brain activation evoked by complex sentence processing). Previous developmental studies indicate a missing increase of activation in accordance to sentence complexity (functional selectivity) in language-relevant brain areas in children. To determine the factors contributing to the functional development of language-relevant brain areas, different methodologies and data acquisition techniques were used to investigate the processing of center-embedded sentences in 5- and 6-year-old children, 7- and 8-year-old children, and adults. Behavioral results indicate that children between 5 and 8 years show difficulties in processing double embedded sentences and that their performance for these type of sentences is positively correlated with digit span. In 7- and 8-year-old children, it was found that especially the processing of long-distance relations between the initial phrase and its corresponding verb appears to be associated with the subject's verbal working memory capacity. In contrast, children's performance for double embedded sentences in the younger age group positively correlated with their performance in a standardized sentence comprehension test. This finding supports the hypothesis that processing difficulties in this age group may be mainly attributed to difficulties in processing case marking information. These findings are discussed with respect to current accounts of language and working memory development. A second study aimed at investigating the structural maturation of brain areas involved in sentence comprehension. To do this, whole-brain magnetic resonance images from 59 children between 5 and 8 years were collected and children's gray matter was analyzed by using voxel-based morphometry. Children's grammatical proficiency was assessed by a standardized sentence comprehension test. A confirmatory factory analysis corroborated a grammar-relevant and a verbal working memory-relevant factor underlying the measured performance. While children's ability to assign thematic roles is positively correlated with gray matter probability (GMP) in the left inferior temporal gyrus and the left inferior frontal gyrus, verbal working memory-related performance is positively correlated with GMP in the left parietal operculum extending into the posterior superior temporal gyrus. These areas have been previously shown to be differentially engaged in adults' complex sentence processing. Thus, the findings of the second study suggest a specific correspondence between children's GMP in language-relevant brain regions and differential cognitive abilities which underlie complex sentence comprehension. In a third study, functional brain activity during the processing of center-embedded sentences was investigated in three different age groups (5-6 years, 7-8 years, and adults). Although all age groups engage a qualitatively comparable network of the left pars opercularis (PO), the left inferior parietal lobe extending into the posterior superior temporal gyrus (IPL/pSTG), the supplementary motor area (SMA) and the cerebellum, functional selectivity of these regions was only observable in adults. However, functional activation of the language-related regions (PO and IPL/pSTG) predicted sentence comprehension performance for all age groups. To solve the question of the complex interplay between different maturational factors, a fourth study analyzed the predictive power of gray matter probability, verbal working memory capacity, and behavioral differences in performance for simple and complex sentence for the functional selectivity of each activated region. These analyses revealed that the establishment of the adult-like functional selectivity for complex sentences is predicted by a reduction of the left PO's gray matter probability across age groups while that of the IPL/pSTG is additionally predicted by verbal working memory capacity. Taken all findings together, the current thesis provides evidence that both structural brain maturation and verbal working memory expansion provide the basis for the emergence of functional selectivity in language-related brain regions leading to more efficient sentence processing during development.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Grimm2007,
  author    = {Grimm, Angela},
  title     = {The development of word-prosodic structure in child German : simplex words and compounds},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-43194},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2007},
  abstract  = {Die Dissertation untersucht die Entwicklung der prosodischen Struktur von Simplizia und Komposita im Deutschen. Ausgewertet werden langzeitlich erhobene Produktionsdaten von vier monolingualen Kindern im Alter von 12 bis 26 Monaten. Es werden vier Entwicklungsstufen angenommen, in denen jedoch keine einheitlichen Outputs produziert werden. Die Asymmetrien zwischen den verschiedenen W{\"o}rtern werden systematisch auf die Struktur des Zielwortes zur{\"u}ckgef{\"u}hrt. In einer optimalit{\"a}tstheoretischen Analyse wird gezeigt, dass sich die Entwicklungsstufen aus der Umordnung von Constraints ergeben und dass dasselbe Ranking die Variation zwischen den Worttypen zu einer bestimmten Entwicklungsstufe vorhersagt.},
  language  = {de}
}
@phdthesis{Herold2011,
  author    = {Herold, Birgit},
  title     = {Prosodische Verarbeitung und lexikalische Entwicklung sehr untergewichtiger Fr{\"u}hgeborener w{\"a}hrend des ersten Lebensjahres},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  isbn      = {978-3-86956-107-3},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-48517},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {xv, 244},
  year      = {2011},
  abstract  = {Die vorliegende Arbeit besch{\"a}ftigt sich mit der Fragestellung, ob die Fr{\"u}hgeburtlichkeit eine Auswirkung auf den Spracherwerb im ersten Lebensjahr hat. Insbesondere wurde der Frage nachgegangen, ob sich die Verarbeitung der rhythmisch-prosodischen Eigenschaften von Sprache im ersten Lebensjahr und deren weitere Ausnutzung f{\"u}r die Entwicklung des Lexikons bei sehr untergewichtigen Deutsch lernenden Fr{\"u}hgeborenen im Vergleich zu Reifgeborenen unterscheidet. Die besondere Spracherwerbssituation Fr{\"u}hgeborener liefert weitere Erkenntnisse bez{\"u}glich der Frage, inwieweit der fr{\"u}he Spracherwerb durch pr{\"a}determinierte reifungsbedingte Mechanismen und Abl{\"a}ufe bestimmt wird und inwieweit dessen Verlauf und die relevanten Erwerbsmechanismen durch individuelle erfahrungsabh{\"a}ngige Faktoren beeinflusst werden. Damit liefern die Ergebnisse auch einen weiteren Beitrag zur Nature-Nurture-Diskussion.},
  language  = {de}
}
@phdthesis{Herrmann2013,
  author    = {Herrmann, Heike},
  title     = {Zum Erwerb syntaktischer Aspekte von positiven und negativen W-Fragen im unauff{\"a}lligen und auff{\"a}lligen Spracherwerb des Deutschen},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  isbn      = {978-3-86956-293-3},
  issn      = {1869-3830},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-70606},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {362},
  year      = {2013},
  abstract  = {Der W-Fragen-Erwerb stellt einen Teilbereich der kindlichen Syntaxentwicklung dar, die sich maßgeblich innerhalb der ersten drei Lebensjahre eines Kindes vollzieht. Eine wesentliche Rolle spielen dabei zwei Bewegungsoperationen, die sich auf die Position des Interrogativpronomens an die erste Stelle der W-Frage sowie die Position des Verbs an die zweite Stelle beziehen. In drei Studien wurde einerseits untersucht, ob deutschsprachige Kinder, die noch keine W-Fragen produzieren k{\"o}nnen, in der Lage sind, grammatische von ungrammatischen W-Fragen zu unterscheiden und andererseits, welche Leistungen sprachunauff{\"a}llige und sprachauff{\"a}llige deutschsprachige Kinder beim Verstehen und Korrigieren unterschiedlich komplexer W-Fragen (positive und negative W-Fragen) zeigen. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf ein fr{\"u}hes syntaktisches Wissen {\"u}ber W-Fragen im Spracherwerb hin und st{\"u}tzen damit die Annahme einer Kontinuit{\"a}t der kindlichen Grammatik zur Standardsprache. Auch scheinen sprachauff{\"a}llige Kinder sich beim Erwerb von W-Fragen nicht qualitativ von sprachgesunden Kindern zu unterscheiden, sondern W-Fragen lediglich sp{\"a}ter korrekt umzusetzen. In beiden Populationen konnte ein syntaktischer {\"O}konomieeffekt beobachtet werden, der f{\"u}r eine sp{\"a}tere Umsetzung der Verbbewegung im Vergleich zur Bewegung des W-Elementes spricht.},
  language  = {de}
}
@phdthesis{HolzgrefeLang2017,
  author    = {Holzgrefe-Lang, Julia},
  title     = {Prosodic phrase boundary perception in adults and infants},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-405943},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {VIII, 141},
  year      = {2017},
  abstract  = {Prosody is a rich source of information that heavily supports spoken language comprehension. In particular, prosodic phrase boundaries divide the continuous speech stream into chunks reflecting the semantic and syntactic structure of an utterance. This chunking or prosodic phrasing plays a critical role in both spoken language processing and language acquisition. Aiming at a better understanding of the underlying processing mechanisms and their acquisition, the present work investigates factors that influence prosodic phrase boundary perception in adults and infants. Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, three experimental studies examined the role of prosodic context (i.e., phrase length) in German phrase boundary perception and of the main prosodic boundary cues, namely pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. With regard to the boundary cues, the dissertation focused on the questions which cues or cue combination are essential for the perception of a prosodic boundary and on whether and how this cue weighting develops during infancy. Using ERPs is advantageous because the technique captures the immediate impact of (linguistic) information during on-line processing. Moreover, as it can be applied independently of specific task demands or an overt response performance, it can be used with both infants and adults. ERPs are particularly suitable to study the time course and underlying mechanisms of boundary perception, because a specific ERP component, the Closure Positive Shift (CPS) is well established as neuro-physiological indicator of prosodic boundary perception in adults. The results of the three experimental studies first underpin that the prosodic context plays an immediate role in the processing of prosodic boundary information. Moreover, the second study reveals that adult listeners perceive a prosodic boundary also on the basis of a sub-set of the boundary cues available in the speech signal. Both ERP and simultaneously collected behavioral data (i.e., prosodic judgements) suggest that the combination of pitch change and final lengthening triggers boundary perception; however, when presented as single cues, neither pitch change nor final lengthening were sufficient. Finally, testing six- and eight-month-old infants shows that the early sensitivity for prosodic information is reflected in a brain response resembling the adult CPS. For both age groups, brain responses to prosodic boundaries cued by pitch change and final lengthening revealed a positivity that can be interpreted as a CPS-like infant ERP component. In contrast, but comparable to the adults' response pattern, pitch change as a single cue does not provoke an infant CPS. These results show that infant phrase boundary perception is not exclusively based on pause detection and hint at an early ability to exploit subtle, relational prosodic cues in speech perception.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{KlannDeliusKauschkeGluecketal.2008,
  author    = {Klann-Delius, Gisela and Kauschke, Christina and Gl{\"u}ck, Christian W. and Schr{\"o}der, Astrid and Lorenz, Antje and Domahs, Frank and Grande, Marion and Domahs, Ulrike and Frankenberg, Jenny v. and Wahl, Michael and De Kok, D{\"o}rte and Stadie, Nicole and Machleb, Franziska and Manz, Katrin and Frank, Ulrike and Sperlich, Kathrin and Vauth, Friederike and Hampel, Pamela and M{\"a}der, Mark and Sticher, Heike and Bethmann, Anja and Fischenich, Andrea and Scheich, Henning and Brechmann, Andr{\´e} and Peschke, Claudia and Ziegler, Wolfram and Kappes, Juliane and Baumg{\"a}rtner, Annette and Sonntag, Kristin and Bartels, Luise and Heide, Judith and Meinunger, Andr{\´e} and Burchert, Frank and Bohn, Christiane and Kliegl, Reinhold and Gottal, Stephanie and Berendes, Karin and Grabherr, Britta and Schneeberg, Jennifer and Wittler, Marion and Ptok, Martin and Sallat, Stephan},
  title     = {Spektrum Patholinguistik = Schwerpunktthema: der Erwerb von Lexikon und Semantik: Meilensteine, St{\"o}rungen und Therapie ; Tagungsband zum 1. Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik, 24. November 2007},
  number    = {1},
  editor    = {Wahl, Michael and Michael, Judith and Hanne, Sandra},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  organization    = {Verband f{\"u}r Patholinguistik e. V. (vpl)},
  issn      = {1869-3822},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-1719},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-18688},
  year      = {2008},
  abstract  = {Der vorliegende Tagungsband enth{\"a}lt alle Beitr{\"a}ge des 1. Herbsttreffens Patholinguistik, das am 24.11.2007 an der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam stattgefunden hat. Sowohl die drei Hauptvortr{\"a}ge zum Thema „Der Erwerb von Lexikon und Semantik - Meilensteine, St{\"o}rungen und Therapie" als auch die Kurzvortr{\"a}ge promovierter Patholinguisten sind ausf{\"u}hrlich dokumentiert. Außerdem enth{\"a}lt der Tagungsband die Abstracts der pr{\"a}sentierten Poster.},
  language  = {de}
}