@misc{Fischer2016,
  type      = {Master Thesis},
  author    = {Fischer, Friederike},
  title     = {SLA research and course books for EFL},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-395163},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {63},
  year      = {2016},
  abstract  = {Die vorliegende Arbeit besch{\"a}ftigt sich mit der Grammatikvermittlung im Englischunterricht. Im Rahmen dessen wird ein Schulbuch (English G 21 A2) daraufhin untersucht ob es kompatibel mit aktuellen Theorien zum Zweitspracherwerb ist. Zu Beginn der Arbeit werden historische und aktuelle Auffassungen zur Grammatikvermittlung zusammengefasst und im Anschluss der aktuelle Rahmenlehrplan auf seine Aussagen hinsichtlich der zu vermittelnden Grammatik im Fremdsprachenunterricht untersucht. Hierbei wird deutlich dass der Rahmenlehrplan des Landes Brandenburg wenige Vorgaben bez{\"u}glich der grammatischen Ph{\"a}nomene, die behandelt werden sollen, gibt. Dies erkl{\"a}rt unter anderem den hohen Stellenwert, den Lehrb{\"u}cher im Fremdsprachenunterricht haben. Sie dienen den Lehrenden als Materialquelle und gleichzeitig als Richtlinie daf{\"u}r, welche Themen wie und in welcher Reihenfolge unterrichtet werden k{\"o}nnen. Es folgt eine {\"U}bersicht {\"u}ber kognitive Theorien des Zweitspracherwerbs und des Sprachunterrichts, u.a. Krashens Monitorhypothese, R. Ellis' Weak Interface Modell oder Pienemanns Processability Theory. Auf der Basis dieser Theorien werden Kriterien f{\"u}r die Gestaltung von Schulb{\"u}chern, die einen m{\"o}glichst aktuellen Erkenntnissen folgenden Grammatikunterricht unterst{\"u}tzen herausgearbeitet. Dazu geh{\"o}ren das Anbieten von viel zielsprachlichem Input, Bereitstellung von {\"U}bungen (practice) und bewusstmachenden Aktivit{\"a}ten (consciousness-raising activities), das Beachten der Erwerbssequenz und das Bereitstellen eines diagnostischen Instruments sodass die Sch{\"u}lerinnen und Sch{\"u}ler herausfinden k{\"o}nnen, wo sie im Fremdsprachenerwerb stehen und woran sie noch arbeiten m{\"u}ssen. Auch das Anbieten vieler Gelegenheiten zur (individuellen) Wiederholung wird als sehr wichtig herausgestellt. All diese Vorgaben stehen nat{\"u}rlich unter dem Vorbehalt dass Schulb{\"u}cher den Unterricht nur in begrenztem Maße beeinflussen k{\"o}nnen und die endg{\"u}ltigen Entscheidungen von den Lehrenden in der Situation getroffen werden. F{\"u}r den Analyseteil wird eine kommunikative Absicht, die in der Regel im Englischunterricht der Sekundarstufe 1 behandelt wird, herausgegriffen. Es handelt sich dabei um die F{\"a}higkeit, {\"u}ber die Zukunft zu sprechen. Dazu werden zun{\"a}chst die M{\"o}glichkeiten im Englischen {\"u}ber die Zukunft zu sprechen beschrieben und in der didaktischen Analyse f{\"u}r die Vermittlung im Unterricht reduziert. Nach einer Beschreibung des betrachteten Schulbuchs und der Behandlung dieses Themas in diesem Buch wird dies mit den ausgearbeiteten Kriterien verglichen. Hierbei stellt sich heraus, dass das Buch in vielen Punkten durchaus mit aktuellen Zweitspracherwerbstheorien kompatibel ist (z.B. bez{\"u}glich des Einarbeitens von Erkl{\"a}rungen zu grammatikalischen Strukturen) in anderen jedoch noch Raum f{\"u}r Verbesserungen besteht (z.B. bez{\"u}glich der F{\"u}lle des Inputs und der Anzahl an bewusstmachenden Aktivit{\"a}ten).},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{Elsaesser2017,
  type      = {Master Thesis},
  author    = {Els{\"a}sser, Joshua Philipp},
  title     = {Institutional interplay in global environmental governance},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-406183},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {V, 64},
  year      = {2017},
  abstract  = {The Rio Conventions stand at the centerpiece of international cooperation within the governance area of climate change, biodiversity, and desertification. Due to substantial environmental and political linkages, there are interrelations between the three regimes. This study seeks to examine the inter-institutional relationship between the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification by analyzing and assessing their horizontal interplay activities from the starting point of their genesis at Earth Summit in 1992 until today. In this research, I address the connections between the three conventions and identify the conflicting, cooperative, and synergetic aspects of inter-institutional relationship. While the overall empirical analysis suggests weak indications of a conflictive type, this research asserts that the interplay activities have thus far led to a cooperative relationship between the Rio Conventions. Moreover, increasing coordination and collaboration between the conventions' treaty secretariats signals characteristics of a synergetic relationship, which could open up a potential window of opportunity for these actors to further engage and progress in institutional management in the future. In a conclusion, this study explores the possibility of the formation of an overarching environmental institution as a result of joint institutional management within the complex of climate change, biodiversity, and desertification.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{Egorova2022,
  type      = {Master Thesis},
  author    = {Egorova, Alisa},
  title     = {Hunting Down Animal Verbs},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-55770},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-557705},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {79},
  year      = {2022},
  abstract  = {Language change is an essential feature of human language, and it is therefore one of the focal areas of the scientific study of language. Language change is always tacitly at work in all languages of the world and at all levels of a given language, be it phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, etc. It has been suggested that it is precisely the capacity to constantly change and adjust that allows language to keep serving the communicative goals of its users, from ancient to modern times (Fauconnier \& Turner, 2003, p. 179). This thesis investigates an especially salient pattern of lexicogrammatical change, namely word-formation of verbs from animal nouns by zero-derivation, in the process of which such nouns as, for example, dog, horse, or beaver change their usage and meaning to produce animal verbs: to dog 'to follow someone persistently and with a malicious intent', to horse about/around 'to make fun of, to 'rag', to ridicule someone' and to beaver away 'to work at working with great enthusiasm' respectively. In the previous literature this pattern of language change has been termed verbal zoosemy (e.g. Kiełtyka, 2016), i.e. metaphorical construal of human actions by means of linguistic material from the domain of animals. The approach taken in this study is not to simply report on the objective changes in the morphology, syntactic distribution and meaning of such linguistic units before and after conversion, but to uncover the complexity of cognitive mechanisms which allow the speakers of English to reclassify such well-established nominal units as animal noun into verbs. It is assumed that the grammatical change in these lexical units is predicated on and triggered by preceding semantic change. Thus, the study is set in the framework of Cognitive Historical Semantics and employs the Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy Theory (CMMT) to untangle the intricacies of the semantic change making the grammatical change of animal nouns into verbs possible and acceptable in the minds of English speakers. To this end, this study employed the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) to compile a glossary of 96 denominal animal verbal forms tied to 209 verbal senses (most verbs in the dataset displayed polysemy). The data collected from the OED Online included not only the senses of the verbs, but also the date of the earliest recorded use of the verbal form with the given sense (regarded in the study as the date of conversion), the earliest usage examples for individual senses and morphologically or semantically related linguistic units from the lexical field of the respective parent noun which were amenable to explaining the observed instances of semantic change. Each instance of zoosemisation, i.e. of the creation of a separate metaphorical verbal sense, was then carefully analysed on the basis of the data collected and classified with the help of the CMMT. In the final stage, a comprehensive and systematic classification of the senses of animal verbs in accordance with the cognitive mechanisms of their creation (metaphor, metonymy, or a combination thereof) was produced together with a timeline of the first appearance of individual metaphorical senses of animal verbs recorded in the OED. The results show that animal verbs are produced through the interaction of conceptual metaphor and metonymy. Specifically, it was established that two major patterns of metaphor-metonymy interaction underpinning the process of verbal zoosemisation are metaphor from metonymy and metonymy from metaphor. In the former pattern, either an already existing metonymic animal verb is expanded to include the target domain PEOPLE, or the animal noun itself acts as a metonymic vehicle to a certain element of the idealised cognitive model of the given animal, which is metaphorically projected onto people. In the latter mechanism, a metaphorical projection of an animal term initially enters the lexicon in the form of a metaphorical animal noun referring to a human entity, and later in the course of language development it comes to metonymically stand for the action, which the given entity either performs or is involved in. Secondarily, it was observed that individual animal nouns can undergo multiple rounds of zoosemic conversion over time depending on the semantic frame in which the given linguistic unit undergoes denominal conversion, and that results in the polysemy of most animal verbs.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{Daempfling2021,
  type      = {Master Thesis},
  author    = {D{\"a}mpfling, Helge Leoard Carl},
  title     = {DeepGeoMap},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-52057},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-520575},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {ii, 81},
  year      = {2021},
  abstract  = {In recent years, deep learning improved the way remote sensing data is processed. The classification of hyperspectral data is no exception. 2D or 3D convolutional neural networks have outperformed classical algorithms on hyperspectral image classification in many cases. However, geological hyperspectral image classification includes several challenges, often including spatially more complex objects than found in other disciplines of hyperspectral imaging that have more spatially similar objects (e.g., as in industrial applications, aerial urban- or farming land cover types). In geological hyperspectral image classification, classical algorithms that focus on the spectral domain still often show higher accuracy, more sensible results, or flexibility due to spatial information independence. In the framework of this thesis, inspired by classical machine learning algorithms that focus on the spectral domain like the binary feature fitting- (BFF) and the EnGeoMap algorithm, the author of this thesis proposes, develops, tests, and discusses a novel, spectrally focused, spatial information independent, deep multi-layer convolutional neural network, named 'DeepGeoMap', for hyperspectral geological data classification. More specifically, the architecture of DeepGeoMap uses a sequential series of different 1D convolutional neural networks layers and fully connected dense layers and utilizes rectified linear unit and softmax activation, 1D max and 1D global average pooling layers, additional dropout to prevent overfitting, and a categorical cross-entropy loss function with Adam gradient descent optimization. DeepGeoMap was realized using Python 3.7 and the machine and deep learning interface TensorFlow with graphical processing unit (GPU) acceleration. This 1D spectrally focused architecture allows DeepGeoMap models to be trained with hyperspectral laboratory image data of geochemically validated samples (e.g., ground truth samples for aerial or mine face images) and then use this laboratory trained model to classify other or larger scenes, similar to classical algorithms that use a spectral library of validated samples for image classification. The classification capabilities of DeepGeoMap have been tested using two geological hyperspectral image data sets. Both are geochemically validated hyperspectral data sets one based on iron ore and the other based on copper ore samples. The copper ore laboratory data set was used to train a DeepGeoMap model for the classification and analysis of a larger mine face scene within the Republic of Cyprus, where the samples originated from. Additionally, a benchmark satellite-based dataset, the Indian Pines data set, was used for training and testing. The classification accuracy of DeepGeoMap was compared to classical algorithms and other convolutional neural networks. It was shown that DeepGeoMap could achieve higher accuracies and outperform these classical algorithms and other neural networks in the geological hyperspectral image classification test cases. The spectral focus of DeepGeoMap was found to be the most considerable advantage compared to spectral-spatial classifiers like 2D or 3D neural networks. This enables DeepGeoMap models to train data independently of different spatial entities, shapes, and/or resolutions.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{Donges2009,
  type      = {Master Thesis},
  author    = {Donges, Jonathan},
  title     = {Complex networks in the climate system},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-49775},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2009},
  abstract  = {Complex network theory provides an elegant and powerful framework to statistically investigate the topology of local and long range dynamical interrelationships, i.e., teleconnections, in the climate system. Employing a refined methodology relying on linear and nonlinear measures of time series analysis, the intricate correlation structure within a multivariate climatological data set is cast into network form. Within this graph theoretical framework, vertices are identified with grid points taken from the data set representing a region on the the Earth's surface, and edges correspond to strong statistical interrelationships between the dynamics on pairs of grid points. The resulting climate networks are neither perfectly regular nor completely random, but display the intriguing and nontrivial characteristics of complexity commonly found in real world networks such as the internet, citation and acquaintance networks, food webs and cortical networks in the mammalian brain. Among other interesting properties, climate networks exhibit the "small-world" effect and possess a broad degree distribution with dominating super-nodes as well as a pronounced community structure. We have performed an extensive and detailed graph theoretical analysis of climate networks on the global topological scale focussing on the flow and centrality measure betweenness which is locally defined at each vertex, but includes global topological information by relying on the distribution of shortest paths between all pairs of vertices in the network. The betweenness centrality field reveals a rich internal structure in complex climate networks constructed from reanalysis and atmosphere-ocean coupled general circulation model (AOGCM) surface air temperature data. Our novel approach uncovers an elaborately woven meta-network of highly localized channels of strong dynamical information flow, that we relate to global surface ocean currents and dub the backbone of the climate network in analogy to the homonymous data highways of the internet. This finding points to a major role of the oceanic surface circulation in coupling and stabilizing the global temperature field in the long term mean (140 years for the model run and 60 years for reanalysis data). Carefully comparing the backbone structures detected in climate networks constructed using linear Pearson correlation and nonlinear mutual information, we argue that the high sensitivity of betweenness with respect to small changes in network structure may allow to detect the footprints of strongly nonlinear physical interactions in the climate system. The results presented in this thesis are thoroughly founded and substantiated using a hierarchy of statistical significance tests on the level of time series and networks, i.e., by tests based on time series surrogates as well as network surrogates. This is particularly relevant when working with real world data. Specifically, we developed new types of network surrogates to include the additional constraints imposed by the spatial embedding of vertices in a climate network. Our methodology is of potential interest for a broad audience within the physics community and various applied fields, because it is universal in the sense of being valid for any spatially extended dynamical system. It can help to understand the localized flow of dynamical information in any such system by combining multivariate time series analysis, a complex network approach and the information flow measure betweenness centrality. Possible fields of application include fluid dynamics (turbulence), plasma physics and biological physics (population models, neural networks, cell models). Furthermore, the climate network approach is equally relevant for experimental data as well as model simulations and hence introduces a novel perspective on model evaluation and data driven model building. Our work is timely in the context of the current debate on climate change within the scientific community, since it allows to assess from a new perspective the regional vulnerability and stability of the climate system while relying on global and not only on regional knowledge. The methodology developed in this thesis hence has the potential to substantially contribute to the understanding of the local effect of extreme events and tipping points in the earth system within a holistic global framework.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{Dietrich2008,
  type      = {Master Thesis},
  author    = {Dietrich, Jan Philipp},
  title     = {Phase Space Reconstruction using the frequency domain : a generalization of actual methods},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-50738},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2008},
  abstract  = {Phase Space Reconstruction is a method that allows to reconstruct the phase space of a system using only an one dimensional time series as input. It can be used for calculating Lyapunov-exponents and detecting chaos. It helps to understand complex dynamics and their behavior. And it can reproduce datasets which were not measured. There are many different methods which produce correct reconstructions such as time-delay, Hilbert-transformation, derivation and integration. The most used one is time-delay but all methods have special properties which are useful in different situations. Hence, every reconstruction method has some situations where it is the best choice. Looking at all these different methods the questions are: Why can all these different looking methods be used for the same purpose? Is there any connection between all these functions? The answer is found in the frequency domain : Performing a Fourier transformation all these methods getting a similar shape: Every presented reconstruction method can be described as a multiplication in the frequency domain with a frequency-depending reconstruction function. This structure is also known as a filter. From this point of view every reconstructed dimension can be seen as a filtered version of the measured time series. It contains the original data but applies just a new focus: Some parts are amplified and other parts are reduced. Furthermore I show, that not every function can be used for reconstruction. In the thesis three characteristics are identified, which are mandatory for the reconstruction function. Under consideration of these restrictions one gets a whole bunch of new reconstruction functions. So it is possible to reduce noise within the reconstruction process itself or to use some advantages of already known reconstructions methods while suppressing unwanted characteristics of it.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{Debre2014,
  type      = {Master Thesis},
  author    = {Debre, Maria},
  title     = {Testing the limits of civil society in Jordan},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-72974},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {iii, 108},
  year      = {2014},
  abstract  = {Civil society is either considered as a motor of democratization or stabilizer of authoritarian rule. This dichotomy is partly due to the dominance of domains-based definitions of the concept that reduce civil society to a small range of formally organized, independent and democratically oriented NGOs. Additionally, research often treats civil society as a 'black box' without differentiating between potential variations in impact of different types of civil society actors on existing regime structures. In this thesis, I present an alternative conceptualization of civil society based on the interactions of societal actors to arrive at a more inclusive understanding of the term which is more suited for analysis in non-democratic settings. The operationalization of the action-based approach I develop allows for an empirical assessment of a large range of societal activities that can accordingly be categorized from little to very civil society-like depending on their specific modes of interactions within four dimensions. I employ this operationalization in a qualitative case study including different actors in the authoritarian monarchy of Jordan which suggests that Jordanian societal actors mostly exhibit tolerant and democratically oriented modes of interaction and do not reproduce authoritarian patterns. However, even democratically oriented actors do not necessarily take on an oppositional positions vis-{\`a}-vis the authoritarian regime. Thus, the Jordanian civil society might not feature a high potential to challenge existing power structures in the country.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{Ceballos2020,
  type      = {Master Thesis},
  author    = {Ceballos, Juan Camilo},
  title     = {The effect of political finance on corruption risk in Colombia},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-48758},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-487586},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {viii, 95},
  year      = {2020},
  abstract  = {Conventional wisdom holds that large sums of money poured into election campaigns are the gateway to corruption. Allegations of the corrupting influence of money in politics and policy are widespread on the national level. Yet, little empirical evidence has advanced the understanding of such a link on the local level, coupled with blurred corruption measures. This master's thesis tests the effect of campaign finance on public procurement corruption risks in Colombian municipalities, focusing on donations, small donations, and financial disclosure. To that end, I seized publicly disclosed contribution-level data from the 2015 municipal elections and a novel index of institutionalized public procurement corruption risks based upon contract-level data from the near population of local governments. The analysis shows that donations are negatively associated with overall corruption risk, yet they affect specific corruption risks differently. By contrast, small donations seem to correlate positively with direct awarding for a sub-sample of medium-sized municipalities, whereas in their large-sized counterparts the effect of the former on institutionalized corruption is adverse. Finally, financial misreporting is positively linked with market competition restrictions and direct awarding. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of these findings for future research and outline a series of policy recommendations.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{BrigardTorres2019,
  type      = {Master Thesis},
  author    = {Brigard Torres, Juan Camilo},
  title     = {An aesthetic cartography of fast},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-46933},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-469333},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {89},
  year      = {2019},
  abstract  = {In this cartography, I examine M.K. Gandhi's practice of fasting for political purposes from a specifically aesthetic perspective. In other words, to foreground their dramatic qualities, how they in their expressive repetition, patterning and stylization produced a/effected heightened forms of emotions. To carry out this task, I follow the theater scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte's features that give name to her book {\"A}esthetik des Performativen (2004). The cartography is framed in a philosophical presentation of Gandhi's discourse as well as of his historical sources. Moreover, as a second frame, I historicize the fasts, by means of a typology and teleology in context. The historically and discoursively framed cartography maps four main dimensions that define the aesthetics of the performative: mediality, materiality, semioticity and aestheticity. The first part analyses the medial platforms in which the fasts as events have been historically recorded and in which they have left their traces and inscriptions. These historical sources are namely, newspapers, images, newsreels and a documentary film. Secondly, the material dimension depicts Gandhi's corporeal condition, as well as the spatiality and temporality of the fasts. In the third place, I revise and reformulate critically Fischer-Lichte's concepts of "presence" and "representation" with resonating concepts of G. C. Spivak and J. Ranci{\`e}re. This revision illustrates Gandhi's fasts and shows the process of how an individual may become the embodiment or representation of a national body-politic. The last chapter of the cartography explores the autopoetic-feedback loop between Gandhi and the people and finishes with a comparison of the mise en sc{\`e}ne of the hunger artists with the fasts of the Indian the politician, social reformer, and theologian. The text concludes interpreting Gandhi's practice of fasting under the light of the concepts of "intellectual emancipation" and "de-subjectivation" of the philosopher J. Ranci{\`e}re. The four main concerns of this cartography are: Firstly, in the field of Gandhi's reception, to explore the aesthetic dimension as both alternative and complementary to the two hegemonic interpretative lenses, i.e. a hagiographic or a secular political understanding of the fasts. From a theoretical perspective, the cartography pursues to be a transdisciplinary experiment that aims at deploying concepts that have been traditionally developed, derived from and used in the field of the arts (theater, film, literature, aesthetic performance, etc.) in the field of the political. In brief, inverting an expression of Ranci{\`e}re, to understand politics as aesthetics. Thirdly, from a thematic point of view, the cartography inquires the historical forms of staging and perception of hunger. Last yet importantly, it is an inquiry of the practice of fasting as nonviolence, what Gandhi, its most sophisticated modern theoretician and practitioner considered its most radical expression.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{Blum2021,
  type      = {Master Thesis},
  author    = {Blum, Franziska},
  title     = {I see you smile, you must be happy! Social-emotional gains and usability evaluation of the new training tool E.V.A.: A pilot study},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-50550},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-505509},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {XIX, 80},
  year      = {2021},
  abstract  = {Emotions are a complex concept and they are present in our everyday life. Persons on the autism spectrum are said to have difficulties in social interactions, showing deficits in emotion recognition in comparison to neurotypically developed persons. But social-emotional skills are believed to be positively augmented by training. A new adaptive social cognition training tool "E.V.A." is introduced which teaches emotion recognition from face, voice and body language. One cross-sectional and one longitudinal study with adult neurotypical and autistic participants were conducted. The aim of the cross-sectional study was to characterize the two groups and see if differences in their social-emotional skills exist. The longitudinal study, on the other hand, aimed for detecting possible training effects following training with the new training tool. In addition, in both studies usability assessments were conducted to investigate the perceived usability of the new tool for neurotypical as well as autistic participants. Differences were found between autistic and neurotypical participants in their social-emotional and emotion recognition abilities. Training effects for neurotypical participants in an emotion recognition task were found after two weeks of home training. Similar perceived usability was found for the neurotypical and autistic participants. The current findings suggest that persons with ASC do not have a general deficit in emotion recognition, but are in need for more time to correctly recognize emotions. In addition, findings suggest that training emotion recognition abilities is possible. Further studies are needed to verify if the training effects found for neurotypical participants also manifest in a larger ASC sample.},
  language  = {en}
}
@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}
}