@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{Mueller2010,
  author    = {M{\"u}ller, Anja},
  title     = {Wie interpretieren Kinder nur? : Experimentelle Untersuchungen zum Erwerb von Informationsstruktur},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-57767},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2010},
  abstract  = {Im Zentrum der Arbeit steht die Frage, wie sechsj{\"a}hrige monolingual deutsche Kinder S{\"a}tze mit der Fokuspartikel nur interpretieren. In 5 Experimenten wurde untersucht, welchen Einfluss die Oberfl{\"a}chenposition der Fokuspartikel auf das Satzverst{\"a}ndnis hat und ob die kontextuelle Einbettung der nur-S{\"a}tze zu einer zielsprachlichen Interpretation f{\"u}hrt. Im Gegensatz zu den Ergebnissen bisheriger Studien (u.a. Crain, et al. 1994; Paterson et al. 2003) zeigen die Daten der Arbeit, dass die getesteten Kinder die pr{\"a}sentierten nur-S{\"a}tze zielsprachlich interpretierten, wenn diese in einen ad{\"a}quaten Kontext eingebettet waren. Es zeigte sich weiterhin, dass die Kinder mehr Fehler bei der Interpretation von S{\"a}tzen mit nur vor dem Subjekt (Nur die Maus hat einen Ball.) als mit nur vor dem Objekt (Die Maus hat nur einen Ball.) machten. Entgegen dem syntaktisch basierten Ansatz von Crain et al. (1994) und dem semantisch-pragmatisch basierten Ansatz von Paterson et al. (2003) werden in der Arbeit informationsstrukturelle Eigenschaften bzw. Unterschiede der nur-S{\"a}tze f{\"u}r die beobachteten Leistungen verantwortlich gemacht. Der in der Arbeit postulierte Topik-Default Ansatz nimmt an, dass die Kinder das Subjekt eines Satzes immer als Topik analysieren. Dies f{\"u}hrt im Fall der S{\"a}tze mit nur vor dem Subjekt zu einer falschen informationsstrukturellen Repr{\"a}sentation des Satzes. Basierend auf den Ergebnissen der Arbeit und dem postulierten Topik-Default Ansatz wird in der Arbeit abschließend ein Erwerbsmodell f{\"u}r das Verstehen von S{\"a}tzen mit der Fokuspartikel nur entworfen und diskutiert.},
  language  = {de}
}
@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}
}
@phdthesis{Trautwein2019,
  author    = {Trautwein, Jutta},
  title     = {The Mental lexicon in acquisition},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-43431},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-434314},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {IV, 177},
  year      = {2019},
  abstract  = {The individual's mental lexicon comprises all known words as well related infor-mation on semantics, orthography and phonology. Moreover, entries connect due to simi-larities in these language domains building a large network structure. The access to lexical information is crucial for processing of words and sentences. Thus, a lack of information in-hibits the retrieval and can cause language processing difficulties. Hence, the composition of the mental lexicon is essential for language skills and its assessment is a central topic of lin-guistic and educational research. In early childhood, measurement of the mental lexicon is uncomplicated, for example through parental questionnaires or the analysis of speech samples. However, with growing content the measurement becomes more challenging: With more and more words in the mental lexicon, the inclusion of all possible known words into a test or questionnaire be-comes impossible. That is why there is a lack of methods to assess the mental lexicon for school children and adults. For the same reason, there are only few findings on the courses of lexical development during school years as well as its specific effect on other language skills. This dissertation is supposed to close this gap by pursuing two major goals: First, I wanted to develop a method to assess lexical features, namely lexicon size and lexical struc-ture, for children of different age groups. Second, I aimed to describe the results of this method in terms of lexical development of size and structure. Findings were intended to help understanding mechanisms of lexical acquisition and inform theories on vocabulary growth. The approach is based on the dictionary method where a sample of words out of a dictionary is tested and results are projected on the whole dictionary to determine an indi-vidual's lexicon size. In the present study, the childLex corpus, a written language corpus for children in German, served as the basis for lexicon size estimation. The corpus is assumed to comprise all words children attending primary school could know. Testing a sample of words out of the corpus enables projection of the results on the whole corpus. For this purpose, a vocabulary test based on the corpus was developed. Afterwards, test performance of virtual participants was simulated by drawing different lexicon sizes from the corpus and comparing whether the test items were included in the lexicon or not. This allowed determination of the relation between test performance and total lexicon size and thus could be transferred to a sample of real participants. Besides lexicon size, lexical content could be approximated with this approach and analyzed in terms of lexical structure. To pursue the presented aims and establish the sampling method, I conducted three consecutive studies. Study 1 includes the development of a vocabulary test based on the childLex corpus. The testing was based on the yes/no format and included three versions for different age groups. The validation grounded on the Rasch Model shows that it is a valid instrument to measure vocabulary for primary school children in German. In Study 2, I estab-lished the method to estimate lexicon sizes and present results on lexical development dur-ing primary school. Plausible results demonstrate that lexical growth follows a quadratic function starting with about 6,000 words at the beginning of school and about 73,000 words on average for young adults. Moreover, the study revealed large interindividual differences. Study 3 focused on the analysis of network structures and their development in the mental lexicon due to orthographic similarities. It demonstrates that networks possess small-word characteristics and decrease in interconnectivity with age. Taken together, this dissertation provides an innovative approach for the assessment and description of the development of the mental lexicon from primary school onwards. The studies determine recent results on lexical acquisition in different age groups that were miss-ing before. They impressively show the importance of this period and display the existence of extensive interindividual differences in lexical development. One central aim of future research needs to address the causes and prevention of these differences. In addition, the application of the method for further research (e.g. the adaptation for other target groups) and teaching purposes (e.g. adaptation of texts for different target groups) appears to be promising.},
  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}
}
@misc{SchroederGrimmSchulzetal.2017,
  author    = {Schr{\"o}der, Astrid and Grimm, Angela and Schulz, Petra and Heide, Judith and Frank, Ulrike and Wahl, Michael and Lampe, Leonie and Fieder, Nora and Krajenbrink, Trudy and Nickels, Lyndsey and Bykova, Ksenia and Wilzek, Alexa and van den Engl-Hoek, Lenie and Huckabee, Maggie-Lee and Balzer, Julia and Ebert, Susanne and Kaps, Hella and Matteschk, Maria and Tzsch{\"o}ckel, Katharina Andrea and Dressel, Katharina and Kr{\"o}ger, Bernd J. and Diwoky, Laura Cassandra and Breitenstein, Sarah and Bruno, Giulia and Lassotta, Romy and Adani, Flavia and Ferchland, Lisa and Baatz, Charlotte and Netzebandt, Jonka and Heyde, Cornelia J. and Cleland, Joanne and Scobbie, James M. and Roxburgh, Zoe and Schmidt, Jessica},
  title     = {Spektrum Patholinguistik Band 10. Schwerpunktthema: Panorama Patholinguistik: Sprachwissenschaft trifft Sprachtherapie},
  number    = {10},
  editor    = {Adelt, Anne and Yetim, {\"O}zlem and Otto, Constanze and Fritzsche, Tom},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  organization    = {Verband f{\"u}r Patholinguistik e. V. (vpl)},
  isbn      = {978-3-86956-404-3},
  issn      = {1866-9085},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-39701},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-397019},
  pages     = {vii, 225 S.},
  year      = {2017},
  abstract  = {Das 10. Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik mit dem Schwerpunktthema »Panorama Patholinguistik: Sprachwissenschaft trifft Sprachtherapie« fand am 19.11.2016 in Potsdam statt. Das Herbsttreffen wird seit 2007 j{\"a}hrlich vom Verband f{\"u}r Patholinguistik e.V. (vpl) durchgef{\"u}hrt. Der vorliegende Tagungsband beinhaltet die vier Hauptvortr{\"a}ge zum Schwerpunktthema sowie Beitr{\"a}ge zu den Kurzvortr{\"a}gen »Patholinguistik im Fokus« und der Posterpr{\"a}sentationen zu weiteren Themen aus der sprachtherapeutischen Forschung und Praxis.},
  language  = {de}
}
@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}
}
@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{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}
}
@phdthesis{Kuehnast2010,
  author    = {Kuehnast, Milena},
  title     = {Processing negative imperatives in Bulgarian : evidence from normal, aphasic and child language},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-45826},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2010},
  abstract  = {The incremental nature of sentence processing raises questions about the way the information of incoming functional elements is accessed and subsequently employed in building the syntactic structure which sustains interpretation processes. The present work approaches these questions by investigating the negative particle ne used for sentential negation in Bulgarian and its impact on the overt realisation and the interpretation of imperative inflexion, bound aspectual morphemes and clitic pronouns in child, adult and aphasic language. In contrast to other Slavic languages, Bulgarian negative imperatives (NI) are grammatical only with imperfective verbs. We argue that NI are instantiations of overt aspectual coercion induced by the presence of negation as a temporally sensitive sentential operator. The scope relation between imperative mood, negation, and aspect yields the configuration of the imperfective present which in Bulgarian has to be overtly expressed and prompts the imperfective marking of the predicate. The regular and transparent application of the imperfectivising mechanism relates to the organisation of the TAM categories in Bulgarian which not only promotes the representation of fine perspective shifts but also provides for their distinct morphological expression. Using an elicitation task with NI, we investigated the way 3- and 4-year-old children represent negation in deontic contexts as reflected in their use of aspectually appropriate predicates. Our findings suggest that children are sensitive to the imperfectivity requirement in NI from early on. The imperfectivisation strategies reveal some differences from the target morphological realisation. The relatively low production of target imperfectivised prefixed verbs cannot be explained with morphological processing deficits, but rather indicates that up to the age of five children experience difficulties to apply a progressive view point to accomplishments. Two self-paced reading studies present evidence that neurologically unimpaired Bulgarian speakers profit from the syntactic and prosodic properties of negation during online sentence comprehension. The imperfectivity requirement negation imposes on the predicate speeds up lexical access to imperfective verbs. Similarly, clitic pronouns are more accessible after negation due to the phono-syntactic properties of clitic clusters. As the experimental stimuli do not provide external discourse referents, personal pronouns are parsed as object agreement markers. Without subsequent resolution, personal pronouns appear to be less resource demanding than reflexive clitics. This finding is indicative of the syntax-driven co-reference establishment processes triggered through the lexical specification of reflexive clitics. The results obtained from Bulgarian Broca's aphasics show that they exhibit processing patterns similar to those of the control group. Notwithstanding their slow processing speed, the agrammatic group showed no impairment of negation as reflected by their sensitivity to the aspectual requirements of NI, and to the prosodic constraints on clitic placement. The aphasics were able to parse the structural dependency between mood, negation and aspect as functional categories and to represent it morphologically. The prolonged reaction times (RT) elicited by prefixed verbs indicate increasing processing costs due to the semantic integration of prefixes as perfectivity markers into an overall imperfective construal. This inference is supported by the slower RT to reflexive clitics, which undergo a structurally triggered resolution. Evaluated against cross-linguistic findings, the obtained result strongly suggests that aphasic performance with pronouns depends on the interpretation efforts associated with co-reference establishment and varies due to availability of discourse referents. The investigation of normal and agrammatic processing of Bulgarian NI presents support for the hypothesis that the comprehension deficits in Broca's aphasia result from a slowed-down implementation of syntactic operations. The protracted structure building consumes processing resources and causes temporal mismatches with other processes sustaining sentence comprehension. The investigation of the way Bulgarian children and aphasic speakers process NI reveals that both groups are highly sensitive to the imperfective constraint on the aspectual construal imposed by the presence of negation. The imperfective interpretation requires access to morphologically complex verb forms which contain aspectual morphemes with conflicting semantic information - perfective prefixes and imperfective suffixes. Across modalities, both populations exhibit difficulties in processing prefixed imperfectivised verbs which as predicates of negative imperative sentences reflect the inner perspective the speaker and the addressee need to take towards a potentially bounded situation description.},
  language  = {en}
}