@misc{GallitWyschkonPoltzetal.2018,
  author    = {Gallit, Finja and Wyschkon, Anne and Poltz, Nadine and Moraske, Svenja and Kucian, Karin and von Aster, Michael G. and Esser, G{\"u}nter},
  title     = {Henne oder Ei},
  series = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe},
  journal   = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe},
  number    = {632},
  issn      = {1866-8364},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-44135},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-441356},
  pages     = {81 -- 92},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {Fragestellung: Ziel war die Untersuchung der Entwicklung und wechselseitigen Beziehung von Zahlen- und Mengenvorwissen (ZMW), Arbeitsged{\"a}chtnis (AG) und Intelligenz sowie deren Vorhersagekraft f{\"u}r die Rechenleistung in der ersten Klasse. Methodik: 1897 Kindergartenkinder nahmen an dieser Studie teil. Ein Teil dieser Kinder wurde 9 Monate sp{\"a}ter und erneut in der ersten Klasse untersucht. Ergebnisse: W{\"a}hrend des Kindergartenjahres verbesserten sich die Kinder in allen untersuchten Leistungen. Reziproke Zusammenh{\"a}nge zwischen den drei erhobenen Vorl{\"a}uferf{\"a}higkeiten konnten nachgewiesen werden. Das ZMW erwies sich als guter Pr{\"a}diktor f{\"u}r die AG- und Intelligenzleistung. Bei der {\"U}berpr{\"u}fung der Vorhersage des Rechnens erwies sich das ZMW als bester Pr{\"a}diktor der sp{\"a}teren Rechenleistung. Erwartungsgem{\"a}ß zeigten die zu t1 erfassten allgemein-kognitiven Leistungen indirekte Effekte {\"u}ber das ZMW auf die Rechenleistung. Die Intelligenz und das AG zu t2 konnten direkt zur Vorhersage des Rechnens in der ersten Klasse beitragen. Schlussfolgerungen: Die Ergebnisse verdeutlichen, dass das AG und die Intelligenz zwar an dem Aufbau des ZMW beteiligt sind, aber vor allem selbst durch dieses vorhergesagt werden. Die Daten sprechen daf{\"u}r das Potenzial des ZMWs in Trainingsprogrammen zu nutzen, durch dessen F{\"o}rderung auch intellektuelle und Ged{\"a}chtnisleistungen zunehmen k{\"o}nnen, die allesamt die schulische Rechenleistung positiv beeinflussen.},
  language  = {de}
}
@phdthesis{Zakarias2018,
  author    = {Zakari{\´a}s, Lilla},
  title     = {Transfer effects after working memory training in post-stroke aphasia},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-42360},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-423600},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {178},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {Background: Individuals with aphasia after stroke (IWA) often present with working memory (WM) deficits. Research investigating the relationship between WM and language abilities has led to the promising hypothesis that treatments of WM could lead to improvements in language, a phenomenon known as transfer. Although recent treatment protocols have been successful in improving WM, the evidence to date is scarce and the extent to which improvements in trained tasks of WM transfer to untrained memory tasks, spoken sentence comprehension, and functional communication is yet poorly understood. Aims: We aimed at (a) investigating whether WM can be improved through an adaptive n-back training in IWA (Study 1-3); (b) testing whether WM training leads to near transfer to unpracticed WM tasks (Study 1-3), and far transfer to spoken sentence comprehension (Study 1-3), functional communication (Study 2-3), and memory in daily life in IWA (Study 2-3); and (c) evaluating the methodological quality of existing WM treatments in IWA (Study 3). To address these goals, we conducted two empirical studies - a case-controls study with Hungarian speaking IWA (Study 1) and a multiple baseline study with German speaking IWA (Study 2) - and a systematic review (Study 3). Methods: In Study 1 and 2 participants with chronic, post-stroke aphasia performed an adaptive, computerized n-back training. 'Adaptivity' was implemented by adjusting the tasks' difficulty level according to the participants' performance, ensuring that they always practiced at an optimal level of difficulty. To assess the specificity of transfer effects and to better understand the underlying mechanisms of transfer on spoken sentence comprehension, we included an outcome measure testing specific syntactic structures that have been proposed to involve WM processes (e.g., non-canonical structures with varying complexity). Results: We detected a mixed pattern of training and transfer effects across individuals: five participants out of six significantly improved in the n-back training. Our most important finding is that all six participants improved significantly in spoken sentence comprehension (i.e., far transfer effects). In addition, we also found far transfer to functional communication (in two participants out of three in Study 2) and everyday memory functioning (in all three participants in Study 2), and near transfer to unpracticed n-back tasks (in four participants out of six). Pooled data analysis of Study 1 and 2 showed a significant negative relationship between initial spoken sentence comprehension and the amount of improvement in this ability, suggesting that the more severe the participants' spoken sentence comprehension deficit was at the beginning of training, the more they improved after training. Taken together, we detected both near far and transfer effects in our studies, but the effects varied across participants. The systematic review evaluating the methodological quality of existing WM treatments in stroke IWA (Study 3) showed poor internal and external validity across the included 17 studies. Poor internal validity was mainly due to use of inappropriate design, lack of randomization of study phases, lack of blinding of participants and/or assessors, and insufficient sampling. Low external validity was mainly related to incomplete information on the setting, lack of use of appropriate analysis or justification for the suitability of the analysis procedure used, and lack of replication across participants and/or behaviors. Results in terms of WM, spoken sentence comprehension, and reading are promising, but further studies with more rigorous methodology and stronger experimental control are needed to determine the beneficial effects of WM intervention. Conclusions: Results of the empirical studies suggest that WM can be improved with a computerized and adaptive WM training, and improvements can lead to transfer effects to spoken sentence comprehension and functional communication in some individuals with chronic post-stroke aphasia. The fact that improvements were not specific to certain syntactic structures (i.e., non-canonical complex sentences) in spoken sentence comprehension suggest that WM is not involved in the online, automatic processing of syntactic information (i.e., parsing and interpretation), but plays a more general role in the later stage of spoken sentence comprehension (i.e., post-interpretive comprehension). The individual differences in treatment outcomes call for future research to clarify how far these results are generalizable to the population level of IWA. Future studies are needed to identify a few mechanisms that may generalize to at least a subpopulation of IWA as well as to investigate baseline non-linguistic cognitive and language abilities that may play a role in transfer effects and the maintenance of such effects. These may require larger yet homogenous samples.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Engelmann2016,
  author    = {Engelmann, Felix},
  title     = {Toward an integrated model of sentence processing in reading},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-100864},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {xiii, 143},
  year      = {2016},
  abstract  = {In experiments investigating sentence processing, eye movement measures such as fixation durations and regression proportions while reading are commonly used to draw conclusions about processing difficulties. However, these measures are the result of an interaction of multiple cognitive levels and processing strategies and thus are only indirect indicators of processing difficulty. In order to properly interpret an eye movement response, one has to understand the underlying principles of adaptive processing such as trade-off mechanisms between reading speed and depth of comprehension that interact with task demands and individual differences. Therefore, it is necessary to establish explicit models of the respective mechanisms as well as their causal relationship with observable behavior. There are models of lexical processing and eye movement control on the one side and models on sentence parsing and memory processes on the other. However, no model so far combines both sides with explicitly defined linking assumptions. In this thesis, a model is developed that integrates oculomotor control with a parsing mechanism and a theory of cue-based memory retrieval. On the basis of previous empirical findings and independently motivated principles, adaptive, resource-preserving mechanisms of underspecification are proposed both on the level of memory access and on the level of syntactic parsing. The thesis first investigates the model of cue-based retrieval in sentence comprehension of Lewis \& Vasishth (2005) with a comprehensive literature review and computational modeling of retrieval interference in dependency processing. The results reveal a great variability in the data that is not explained by the theory. Therefore, two principles, 'distractor prominence' and 'cue confusion', are proposed as an extension to the theory, thus providing a more adequate description of systematic variance in empirical results as a consequence of experimental design, linguistic environment, and individual differences. In the remainder of the thesis, four interfaces between parsing and eye movement control are defined: Time Out, Reanalysis, Underspecification, and Subvocalization. By comparing computationally derived predictions with experimental results from the literature, it is investigated to what extent these four interfaces constitute an appropriate elementary set of assumptions for explaining specific eye movement patterns during sentence processing. Through simulations, it is shown how this system of in itself simple assumptions results in predictions of complex, adaptive behavior. In conclusion, it is argued that, on all levels, the sentence comprehension mechanism seeks a balance between necessary processing effort and reading speed on the basis of experience, task demands, and resource limitations. Theories of linguistic processing therefore need to be explicitly defined and implemented, in particular with respect to linking assumptions between observable behavior and underlying cognitive processes. The comprehensive model developed here integrates multiple levels of sentence processing that hitherto have only been studied in isolation. The model is made publicly available as an expandable framework for future studies of the interactions between parsing, memory access, and eye movement control.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Jaeger2015,
  author    = {J{\"a}ger, Lena Ann},
  title     = {Working memory and prediction in human sentence parsing},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-82517},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {xi, 144},
  year      = {2015},
  abstract  = {This dissertation investigates the working memory mechanism subserving human sentence processing and its relative contribution to processing difficulty as compared to syntactic prediction. Within the last decades, evidence for a content-addressable memory system underlying human cognition in general has accumulated (e.g., Anderson et al., 2004). In sentence processing research, it has been proposed that this general content-addressable architecture is also used for language processing (e.g., McElree, 2000). Although there is a growing body of evidence from various kinds of linguistic dependencies that is consistent with a general content-addressable memory subserving sentence processing (e.g., McElree et al., 2003; VanDyke2006), the case of reflexive-antecedent dependencies has challenged this view. It has been proposed that in the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies, a syntactic-structure based memory access is used rather than cue-based retrieval within a content-addressable framework (e.g., Sturt, 2003). Two eye-tracking experiments on Chinese reflexives were designed to tease apart accounts assuming a syntactic-structure based memory access mechanism from cue-based retrieval (implemented in ACT-R as proposed by Lewis and Vasishth (2005). In both experiments, interference effects were observed from noun phrases which syntactically do not qualify as the reflexive's antecedent but match the animacy requirement the reflexive imposes on its antecedent. These results are interpreted as evidence against a purely syntactic-structure based memory access. However, the exact pattern of effects observed in the data is only partially compatible with the Lewis and Vasishth cue-based parsing model. Therefore, an extension of the Lewis and Vasishth model is proposed. Two principles are added to the original model, namely 'cue confusion' and 'distractor prominence'. Although interference effects are generally interpreted in favor of a content-addressable memory architecture, an alternative explanation for interference effects in reflexive processing has been proposed which, crucially, might reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account. It has been argued that interference effects do not necessarily reflect cue-based retrieval interference in a content-addressable memory but might equally well be accounted for by interference effects which have already occurred at the moment of encoding the antecedent in memory (Dillon, 2011). Three experiments (eye-tracking and self-paced reading) on German reflexives and Swedish possessives were designed to tease apart cue-based retrieval interference from encoding interference. The results of all three experiments suggest that there is no evidence that encoding interference affects the retrieval of a reflexive's antecedent. Taken together, these findings suggest that the processing of reflexives can be explained with the same cue-based retrieval mechanism that has been invoked to explain syntactic dependency resolution in a range of other structures. This supports the view that the language processing system is located within a general cognitive architecture, with a general-purpose content-addressable working memory system operating on linguistic expressions. Finally, two experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) using Chinese relative clauses were conducted to determine the relative contribution to sentence processing difficulty of working-memory processes as compared to syntactic prediction during incremental parsing. Chinese has the cross-linguistically rare property of being a language with subject-verb-object word order and pre-nominal relative clauses. This property leads to opposing predictions of expectation-based accounts and memory-based accounts with respect to the relative processing difficulty of subject vs. object relatives. Previous studies showed contradictory results, which has been attributed to different kinds local ambiguities confounding the materials (Lin and Bever, 2011). The two experiments presented are the first to compare Chinese relatives clauses in syntactically unambiguous contexts. The results of both experiments were consistent with the predictions of the expectation-based account of sentence processing but not with the memory-based account. From these findings, I conclude that any theory of human sentence processing needs to take into account the power of predictive processes unfolding in the human mind.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Gerth2015,
  author    = {Gerth, Sabrina},
  title     = {Memory limitations in sentence comprehension},
  isbn      = {978-3-86956-321-3},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-71554},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {xviii, 157},
  year      = {2015},
  abstract  = {This dissertation addresses the question of how linguistic structures can be represented in working memory. We propose a memory-based computational model that derives offline and online complexity profiles in terms of a top-down parser for minimalist grammars (Stabler, 2011). The complexity metric reflects the amount of time an item is stored in memory. The presented architecture links grammatical representations stored in memory directly to the cognitive behavior by deriving predictions about sentence processing difficulty. Results from five different sentence comprehension experiments were used to evaluate the model's assumptions about memory limitations. The predictions of the complexity metric were compared to the locality (integration and storage) cost metric of Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 2000). Both metrics make comparable offline and online predictions for four of the five phenomena. The key difference between the two metrics is that the proposed complexity metric accounts for the structural complexity of intervening material. In contrast, DLT's integration cost metric considers the number of discourse referents, not the syntactic structural complexity. We conclude that the syntactic analysis plays a significant role in memory requirements of parsing. An incremental top-down parser based on a grammar formalism easily computes offline and online complexity profiles, which can be used to derive predictions about sentence processing difficulty.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Gendt2011,
  author    = {Gendt, Anja},
  title     = {Eye movements under the control of working memory : the challenge of a reading-span task},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-69224},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2011},
  abstract  = {During reading oculomotor processes guide the eyes over the text. The visual information recorded is accessed, evaluated and processed. Only by retrieving the meaning of a word from the long-term memory, as well as through the connection and storage of the information about each individual word, is it possible to access the semantic meaning of a sentence. Therefore memory, and here in particular working memory, plays a pivotal role in the basic processes of reading. The following dissertation investigates to what extent different demands on memory and memory capacity have an effect on eye movement behavior while reading. The frequently used paradigm of the reading span task, in which test subjects read and evaluate individual sentences, was used for the experimental review of the research questions. The results speak for the fact that working memory processes have a direct effect on various eye movement measurements. Thus a high working memory load, for example, reduced the perceptual span while reading. The lower the individual working memory capacity of the reader was, the stronger was the influence of the working memory load on the processing of the sentence.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Vockenberg2006,
  author    = {Vockenberg, Kerstin},
  title     = {Updating of representations in working memory},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-11767},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2006},
  abstract  = {The limited capacity of working memory forces people to update its contents continuously. Two aspects of the updating process were investigated in the present experimental series. The first series concerned the question if it is possible to update several representations in parallel. Similar results were obtained for the updating of object features as well as for the updating of whole objects, participants were able to update representations in parallel. The second experimental series addressed the question if working memory representations which were replaced in an updating disappear directly or interfere with the new representations. Evidence for the existence of old representations was found under working memory conditions and under conditions exceeding working memory capacity. These results contradict the hypothesis that working memory contents are protected from proactive interference of long-term memory contents.},
  subject      = {Aktualisierung},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Junker2004,
  author    = {Junker, Martina},
  title     = {Der verflixte Akkusativ : Altersunterschiede und Altersinvarianz beim Verstehen von S{\"a}tzen mit unterschiedlich komplexer syntaktischer Struktur},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-3784},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2004},
  abstract  = {In dieser Arbeit wird in mehreren Experimenten untersucht, wie gut junge und alte Erwachsene S{\"a}tze mit unterschiedlich komplexer syntaktischer Struktur verstehen k{\"o}nnen. Zentrales Thema dabei sind die Schwierigkeiten, die {\"a}ltere Erwachsene mit der Objekt-vor-Subjekt-Wortstellung haben. Untersucht wird, inwiefern diese beobachteten Altersunterschiede durch eine reduzierte verbale Arbeitsged{\"a}chtniskapazit{\"a}t der {\"a}lteren Erwachsenen erkl{\"a}rt werden k{\"o}nnen. Dabei stellt sich die Frage, ob die Defizite ein generelles verbales Arbeitsged{\"a}chtnis betreffen oder ob es ein eigenes Verarbeitungs-system f{\"u}r syntaktische Informationen gibt, dessen Kapazit{\"a}t mit dem Alter abnimmt. Es wurde versucht, die postulierte reduzierte Arbeitsged{\"a}chtniskapazit{\"a}t der {\"a}lteren Erwachsenen an jungen Erwachsenen zu simulieren, indem deren Arbeitsged{\"a}chtniska-pazit{\"a}t durch eine Zusatzaufgabe k{\"u}nstlich eingeschr{\"a}nkt wurde. Weiterhin wurden die Altersunterschiede bei syntaktisch komplexen zentraleingebetteten Relativs{\"a}tzen mit denen bei syntaktisch einfacheren koordinierten Haupts{\"a}tzen verglichen. Um die Studienteilnehmer mit den seltenen objektinitialen Strukturen zu konfrontieren und ihre Erfahrung mit solchen S{\"a}tzen zu ver{\"a}ndern, wurden schließlich sowohl junge als auch alte Erwachsene mit S{\"a}tzen mit Objekt-vor-Subjekt-Wortstellung trainiert.},
  subject      = {Gerontologie},
  language  = {de}
}