@article{ReifegersteJarvisFelser2020,
  author    = {Reifegerste, Jana and Jarvis, Rebecca and Felser, Claudia},
  title     = {Effects of chronological age on native and nonnative sentence processing},
  series = {Journal of memory and language},
  volume    = {111},
  journal   = {Journal of memory and language},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {Amsterdam [u.a.]},
  issn      = {0749-596X},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.jml.2019.104083},
  pages     = {23},
  year      = {2020},
  abstract  = {While much attention has been devoted to the cognition of aging multilingual individuals, little is known about how age affects their grammatical processing. We assessed subject-verb number-agreement processing in sixty native (L1) and sixty non-native (L2) speakers of German (age: 18-84) using a binary-choice sentence-completion task, along with various individual-differences tests. Our results revealed differential effects of age on L1 and L2 speakers' accuracy and reaction times (RTs). L1 speakers' RTs increased with age, and they became more susceptible to attraction errors. In contrast, L2 speakers' RTs decreased, once age-related slowing was controlled for, and their overall accuracy increased. We interpret this as resulting from increased L2 exposure. Moreover, L2 speakers' accuracy/RT patterns were more strongly affected by cognitive variables (working memory, interference control) than L1 speakers'. Our findings show that as regards bilinguals' grammatical processing ability, aging is associated with both gains (in experience) and losses (in cognitive abilities).},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{PueblaAntunesFelser2022,
  author    = {Puebla Antunes, Cecilia and Felser, Claudia},
  title     = {Discourse Prominence and Antecedent MisRetrieval during Native and Non-Native Pronoun Resolution},
  series = {Discours : revue de linguistique, psycholinguistique et informatique},
  journal   = {Discours : revue de linguistique, psycholinguistique et informatique},
  number    = {29},
  publisher = {Universit{\´e} de Paris-Sorbonne, Maion Recherche},
  address   = {Paris},
  issn      = {1963-1723},
  doi       = {10.4000/discours.11720},
  pages     = {33},
  year      = {2022},
  abstract  = {Previous studies on non-native (L2) anaphor resolution suggest that L2 comprehenders are guided more strongly by discourse-level cues compared to native (L1) comprehenders. Here we examine whether and how a grammatically inappropriate antecedent's discourse status affects the likelihood of it being considered during L1 and L2 pronoun resolution. We used an interference paradigm to examine how the extrasentential discourse impacts the resolution of German object pronouns. In an eye-tracking-during-reading experiment we examined whether an elaborated local antecedent ruled out by binding Condition B would be mis-retrieved during pronoun resolution, and whether initially introducing this antecedent as the discourse topic would affect the chances of it being mis-retrieved. While both participant groups rejected the inappropriate antecedent in an offline questionnaire irrespective of its discourse prominence, their real-time processing patterns differed. L1 speakers initially mis-retrieved the inappropriate antecedent regardless of its contextual prominence. L1 Russian/L2 German speakers, in contrast, were affected by the antecedent's discourse status, considering it only when it was discourse-new but not when it had previously been introduced as the discourse topic. Our findings show that L2 comprehenders are highly sensitive to discourse dynamics such as topic shifts, supporting the claim that discourse-level cues are more strongly weighted during L2 compared to L1 processing.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{PanedaLagoVaresetal.2020,
  author    = {Pa{\~n}eda, Claudia and Lago, Sol and Vares, Elena and Ver{\´i}ssimo, Jo{\~a}o Marques and Felser, Claudia},
  title     = {Island effects in Spanish comprehension},
  series = {Glossa : a journal of general linguistics},
  volume    = {5},
  journal   = {Glossa : a journal of general linguistics},
  number    = {1},
  publisher = {Open Library of Humanities},
  address   = {London},
  issn      = {2397-1835},
  doi       = {10.5334/gjgl.1058},
  pages     = {30},
  year      = {2020},
  abstract  = {A growing body of experimental syntactic research has revealed substantial variation in the magnitude of island effects, not only across languages but also across different grammatical constructions. Adopting a well-established experimental design, the present study examines island effects in Spanish using a speeded acceptability judgment task. To quantify variation across grammatical constructions, we tested extraction from four different types of structure (subjects, complex noun phrases, adjuncts and interrogative clauses). The results of Bayesian mixed effects modelling showed that the size of island effects varied between constructions, such that there was clear evidence of subject, adjunct and interrogative island effects, but not of complex noun phrase island effects. We also failed to find evidence that island effects were modulated by participants' working memory capacity as measured by an operation span task. To account for our results, we suggest that variability in island effects across constructions may be due to the interaction of syntactic, semantic-pragmatic and processing factors, which may affect island types differentially due to their idiosyncratic properties.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{Felser2019,
  author    = {Felser, Claudia},
  title     = {Do processing resource limitations shape heritage language grammars?},
  series = {Bilingualism : language and cognition},
  volume    = {23},
  journal   = {Bilingualism : language and cognition},
  number    = {1},
  publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
  address   = {New York},
  issn      = {1366-7289},
  doi       = {10.1017/S1366728919000397},
  pages     = {23 -- 24},
  year      = {2019},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{BoschDeCesareDemskeetal.2021,
  author    = {Bosch, Sina and De Cesare, Ilaria and Demske, Ulrike and Felser, Claudia},
  title     = {New empirical approaches to grammatical variation and change},
  series = {Languages : open access journal},
  volume    = {6},
  journal   = {Languages : open access journal},
  number    = {3},
  publisher = {MDPI},
  address   = {Basel},
  issn      = {2226-471X},
  doi       = {10.3390/languages6030113},
  pages     = {3},
  year      = {2021},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{FelserJessen2021,
  author    = {Felser, Claudia and Jessen, Anna},
  title     = {Correlative coordination and variable subject-verb agreement in German},
  series = {Languages : open access journal},
  volume    = {6},
  journal   = {Languages : open access journal},
  number    = {2},
  publisher = {MDPI},
  address   = {Basel},
  issn      = {2226-471X},
  doi       = {10.3390/languages6020067},
  pages     = {20},
  year      = {2021},
  abstract  = {Coordinated subjects often show variable number agreement with the finite verb, but linguistic approaches to this phenomenon have rarely been informed by systematically collected data. We report the results from three experiments investigating German speakers' agreement preferences with complex subjects joined by the correlative conjunctions sowohl horizontal ellipsis als auch ('both horizontal ellipsis and'), weder horizontal ellipsis noch ('neither horizontal ellipsis nor') or entweder horizontal ellipsis oder ('either horizontal ellipsis or'). We examine to what extent conjunction type and a conjunct's relative proximity to the verb affect the acceptability and processibility of singular vs. plural agreement. Experiment 1 was an untimed acceptability rating task, Experiment 2 a timed sentence completion task, and Experiment 3 was a self-paced reading task. Taken together, our results show that number agreement with correlative coordination in German is primarily determined by a default constraint triggering plural agreement, which interacts with linear order and semantic factors. Semantic differences between conjunctions only affected speakers' agreement preferences in the absence of processing pressure but not their initial agreement computation. The combined results from our offline and online experimental measures of German speakers' agreement preferences suggest that the constraints under investigation do not only differ in their relative weighting but also in their relative timing during agreement computation.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{FelserDrummer2022,
  author    = {Felser, Claudia and Drummer, Janna-Deborah},
  title     = {Binding out of relative clauses in native and non-native sentence comprehension},
  series = {Journal of psycholinguistic research},
  volume    = {51},
  journal   = {Journal of psycholinguistic research},
  number    = {4},
  publisher = {Springer},
  address   = {New York},
  issn      = {0090-6905},
  doi       = {10.1007/s10936-022-09845-z},
  pages     = {763 -- 788},
  year      = {2022},
  abstract  = {Pronouns can sometimes covary with a non c-commanding quantifier phrase (QP). To obtain such 'telescoping' readings, a semantic representation must be computed in which the QP's semantic scope extends beyond its surface scope. Non-native speakers have been claimed to have more difficulty than native speakers deriving such non-isomorphic syntax-semantics mappings, but evidence from processing studies is scarce. We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring experiment and an offline questionnaire investigating whether native and non-native speakers of German can link personal pronouns to non c-commanding QPs inside relative clauses. Our results show that both participant groups were able to obtain telescoping readings offline, but only the native speakers showed evidence of forming telescoping dependencies during incremental parsing. During processing the non-native speakers focused on a discourse-prominent, non-quantified alternative antecedent instead. The observed group differences indicate that non-native comprehenders have more difficulty than native comprehenders computing scope-shifted representations in real time.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{ArslanGuerFelser2017,
  author    = {Arslan, Se{\c{c}}kin and G{\"u}r, Eren and Felser, Claudia},
  title     = {Predicting the sources of impaired wh-question comprehension in non-fluent aphasia},
  series = {Cognitive neuropsychology},
  volume    = {34},
  journal   = {Cognitive neuropsychology},
  publisher = {Taylor \& Francis},
  address   = {Abingdon},
  issn      = {0264-3294},
  doi       = {10.1080/02643294.2017.1394284},
  pages     = {312 -- 331},
  year      = {2017},
  abstract  = {This study investigates the comprehension of wh-questions in individuals with aphasia (IWA) speaking Turkish, a non-wh-movement language, and German, a wh-movement language. We examined six German-speaking and 11 Turkish-speaking IWA using picture-pointing tasks. Findings from our experiments show that the Turkish IWA responded more accurately to both object who and object which questions than to subject questions, while the German IWA performed better for subject which questions than in all other conditions. Using random forest models, a machine learning technique used in tree-structured classification, on the individual data revealed that both the Turkish and German IWA's response accuracy is largely predicted by the presence of overt and unambiguous case marking. We discuss our results with regard to different theoretical approaches to the comprehension of wh-questions in aphasia.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{ReifegersteHauerFelser2017,
  author    = {Reifegerste, Jana and Hauer, Franziska and Felser, Claudia},
  title     = {Agreement processing and attraction errors in aging},
  series = {Aging, neuropsychology, and cognition : a journal on normal and dysfunctional development},
  volume    = {24},
  journal   = {Aging, neuropsychology, and cognition : a journal on normal and dysfunctional development},
  number    = {6},
  publisher = {Taylor \& Francis Group},
  address   = {Abingdon},
  issn      = {1382-5585},
  doi       = {10.1080/13825585.2016.1251550},
  pages     = {672 -- 702},
  year      = {2017},
  abstract  = {Effects of aging on lexical processing are well attested, but the picture is less clear for grammatical processing. Where age differences emerge, these are usually ascribed to working-memory (WM) decline. Previous studies on the influence of WM on agreement computation have yielded inconclusive results, and work on aging and subject-verb agreement processing is lacking. In two experiments (Experiment 1: timed grammaticality judgment, Experiment 2: self-paced reading + WM test), we investigated older (OA) and younger (YA) adults' susceptibility to agreement attraction errors. We found longer reading latencies and judgment reaction times (RTs) for OAs. Further, OAs, particularly those with low WM scores, were more accepting of sentences with attraction errors than YAs. OAs showed longer reading latencies for ungrammatical sentences, again modulated by WM, than YAs. Our results indicate that OAs have greater difficulty blocking intervening nouns from interfering with the computation of agreement dependencies. WM can modulate this effect.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{BoxellFelserCunnings2017,
  author    = {Boxell, Oliver and Felser, Claudia and Cunnings, Ian},
  title     = {Antecedent contained deletions in native and non-native sentence processing},
  series = {Linguistic approaches to bilingualism},
  volume    = {7},
  journal   = {Linguistic approaches to bilingualism},
  number    = {5},
  publisher = {John Benjamins Publishing Co.},
  address   = {Amsterdam},
  issn      = {1879-9264},
  doi       = {10.1075/lab.15006.box},
  pages     = {554 -- 582},
  year      = {2017},
  abstract  = {We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring study investigating native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers' real-time processing of antecedent-contained deletion (ACD), a type of verb phrase ellipsis in which the ellipsis gap forms part of its own antecedent. The resulting interpretation problem is traditionally thought to be solved by quantifier raising, a covert scope-shifting operation that serves to remove the gap from within its antecedent. Our L2 group comprised advanced, native German-speaking L2 learners of English. The analysis of the eye-movement data showed that both L1 and L2 English speakers tried to recover the missing verb phrase after encountering the gap. Only the native speakers showed evidence of ellipsis resolution being affected by quantification, however. No effects of quantification following gap detection were found in the L2 group, by contrast, indicating that recovery of the elided material was accomplished independently from the object's quantificational status in this group.},
  language  = {en}
}