@misc{Watermeyer2010,
  type      = {Master Thesis},
  author    = {Watermeyer, Melanie},
  title     = {Ausagieren von S{\"a}tzen versus Satz-Bild-Zuordnung : Vergleich zweier Methoden zur Untersuchung des Sprachverst{\"a}ndnisses anhand von semantisch reversiblen S{\"a}tzen mit Objektvoranstellung bei drei- und f{\"u}nfj{\"a}hrigen Kindern},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-52380},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2010},
  abstract  = {Sprachverst{\"a}ndnisuntersuchungen sind sowohl f{\"u}r die Forschung zum Spracherwerb und zu dessen St{\"o}rungen als auch f{\"u}r die Diagnostik in der klinischen Praxis von essentieller Bedeutung. Zwei der verbreitetesten Methoden zur Erfassung des Verst{\"a}ndnisses von syntaktischen Strukturen sind das Ausagieren von S{\"a}tzen (AS) und die Satz-Bild-Zuordnung (SBZ). Beide Methoden sind mit unterschiedlichen Anforderungen an die Probanden sowie mit spezifischen Vor- und Nachteilen verbunden (vgl. z.B. Goodluck 1996, Gerken \& Shady 1996), woraus sich die Frage ergibt, inwiefern die Wahl der Methode das Testergebnis und die damit verbundenen Schlussfolgerungen beeinflusst. In der hier beschriebenen empirischen Untersuchung wurden die AS- und die SBZ-Methode anhand des Verstehens semantisch reversibler S{\"a}tze mit Objektvoranstellung direkt miteinander verglichen: Jeweils 24 monolingual mit Deutsch als Muttersprache aufwachsenden, sprachunauff{\"a}lligen Kindern im Alter von 3;0 bis 3;5 bzw. 5;0 bis 5;5 Jahren wurden insgesamt zw{\"o}lf Items, von denen neun aus semantisch reversiblen S{\"a}tzen mit Objektvoranstellung und drei aus entsprechenden subjektinitialen Kontrasts{\"a}tzen bestanden, sowohl mittels der AS-Methode als auch mittels der SBZ-Methode pr{\"a}sentiert. Zum Ausagieren der Tests{\"a}tze (AS-Test) wurden Spielzeugfiguren verwendet, f{\"u}r die Satz-Bild-Zuordnung (SBZ-Test) wurden pro Item ein Ziel- und zwei Ablenkerbilder erstellt. Die kindlichen Reaktionen wurden nach syntaktischen Kriterien als korrekt bzw. inkorrekt bewertet, Abweichungen wurden hinsichtlich der Fehlerart klassifiziert. Zus{\"a}tzlich wurde bei den einzelnen Kindern der Erwerbsstand der untersuchten Struktur beurteilt und es wurden, sofern m{\"o}glich, die eingesetzten Sprachverst{\"a}ndnisstrategien ermittelt. Der Vergleich der Methoden ergab f{\"u}r die einzelnen Altersgruppen sehr unterschiedliche Befunde: Bei den 3;0- bis 3;5-j{\"a}hrigen Kindern zeigten sich im SBZ-Test teilweise starke Rateeffekte, die zu verf{\"a}lschten Ergebnissen und kaum interpretierbaren Reaktionsmustern f{\"u}hrten, w{\"a}hrend dies im AS-Test nicht der Fall war. F{\"u}r diese Altersgruppe ist demnach die AS-Methode als die geeignetere anzusehen. Bei den 5;0- bis 5;5-j{\"a}hrigen Kindern konnte indes keine derartige Diskrepanz zwischen den beiden Tests festgestellt werden. Vielmehr waren die Leistungen hier insgesamt vergleichbar, so dass f{\"u}r diese Altersgruppe die AS- und die SBZ-Methode als f{\"u}r die Untersuchung des Syntaxverst{\"a}ndnisses gleichwertig gelten k{\"o}nnen. Dar{\"u}ber hinaus best{\"a}tigte die Untersuchung viele der in der Literatur beschriebenen Vor- und Nachteile der beiden Methoden, darunter der geringere Materialbeschaffungsaufwand bei der AS-Methode, die gr{\"o}ßere Durchf{\"u}hrungspraktikabilit{\"a}t der SBZ-Methode, die h{\"o}here Attraktivit{\"a}t und das geringere Risiko f{\"u}r Antwort-biases bei der AS-Methode, die leichtere Bewertbarkeit der kindlichen Reaktionen bei der SBZ-Methode. Im Vergleich der Altersgruppen zeigte sich, dass die 5;0- bis 5;5-j{\"a}hrigen Kinder Tests{\"a}tze mit Objektvoranstellung deutlich besser verstanden als die 3;0- bis 3;5-j{\"a}hrigen: Die meisten der j{\"u}ngeren Kinder hatten die untersuchte Struktur offenbar noch nicht erworben - sie interpretierten die S{\"a}tze mit Objektvoranstellung stattdessen am h{\"a}ufigsten nach der Wortreihenfolgestrategie, verstanden sie also wie subjektinitiale Strukturen. Von den 5;0- bis 5;5-j{\"a}hrigen Kindern dagegen hatten 75\% die untersuchte Struktur rezeptiv erworben, interpretierten die Tests{\"a}tze also prim{\"a}r korrekt nach der grammatischen Strategie. Aus diesen Ergebnissen wurde geschlossen, dass die Struktur semantisch reversibler S{\"a}tze mit Objektvoranstellung fr{\"u}hestens ab einem Alter von 5;0 bis 5;5 Jahren als in der ungest{\"o}rten Sprachentwicklung rezeptiv erworben gelten kann. Da sich jedoch in beiden Altersgruppen trotz allem eine erhebliche interindividuelle Variation hinsichtlich der Verst{\"a}ndnisf{\"a}higkeiten zeigte, muss insgesamt von einem relativ langen Zeitfenster f{\"u}r den ungest{\"o}rten Erwerb dieser Struktur ausgegangen werden.},
  language  = {de}
}
@phdthesis{BrandtKobele2014,
  author    = {Brandt-Kobele, Oda-Christina},
  title     = {Comprehension of verb inflection in German-speaking children},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  isbn      = {978-3-86956-216-2},
  issn      = {1869-3822},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-62046},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {xx, 325},
  year      = {2014},
  abstract  = {Previous studies on the acquisition of verb inflection in normally developing children have revealed an astonishing pattern: children use correctly inflected verbs in their own speech but fail to make use of verb inflections when comprehending sentences uttered by others. Thus, a three-year old might well be able to say something like 'The cat sleeps on the bed', but fails to understand that the same sentence, when uttered by another person, refers to only one sleeping cat but not more than one. The previous studies that have examined children's comprehension of verb inflections have employed a variant of a picture selection task in which the child was asked to explicitly indicate (via pointing) what semantic meaning she had inferred from the test sentence. Recent research on other linguistic structures, such as pronouns or focus particles, has indicated that earlier comprehension abilities can be found when methods are used that do not require an explicit reaction, like preferential looking tasks. This dissertation aimed to examine whether children are truly not able to understand the connection the the verb form and the meaning of the sentence subject until the age of five years or whether earlier comprehension can be found when a different measure, preferential looking, is used. Additionally, children's processing of subject-verb agreement violations was examined. The three experiments of this thesis that examined children's comprehension of verb inflections revealed the following: German-speaking three- to four-year old children looked more to a picture showing one actor when hearing a sentence with a singular inflected verb but only when their eye gaze was tracked and they did not have to perform a picture selection task. When they were asked to point to the matching picture, they performed at chance-level. This pattern indicates asymmetries in children's language performance even within the receptive modality. The fourth experiment examined sensitivity to subject-verb agreement violations and did not reveal evidence for sensitivity toward agreement violations in three- and four-year old children, but only found that children's looking patterns were influenced by the grammatical violations at the age of five. The results from these experiments are discussed in relation to the existence of a production-comprehension asymmetry in the use of verb inflections and children's underlying grammatical knowledge.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Sauermann2016,
  author    = {Sauermann, Antje},
  title     = {Impact of the type of referring expression on the acquisition of word order variation},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  isbn      = {978-3-86956-330-5},
  issn      = {1869-3822},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-89409},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2016},
  abstract  = {This dissertation examines the impact of the type of referring expression on the acquisition of word order variation in German-speaking preschoolers. A puzzle in the area of language acquisition concerns the production-comprehension asymmetry for non-canonical sentences like "Den Affen f{\"a}ngt die Kuh." ("The monkey, the cow chases."), that is, preschoolers usually have difficulties in accurately understanding non-canonical sentences approximately until age six (e.g., Dittmar et al., 2008) although they produce non-canonical sentences already around age three (e.g., Poeppel \& Wexler, 1993; Weissenborn, 1990). This dissertation investigated the production and comprehension of non-canonical sentences to address this issue. Three corpus analyses were conducted to investigate the impact of givenness, topic status and the type of referring expression on word order in the spontaneous speech of two- to four-year-olds and the child-directed speech produced by their mothers. The positioning of the direct object in ditransitive sentences was examined; in particular, sentences in which the direct object occurred before or after the indirect object in the sentence-medial positions and sentences in which it occurred in the sentence-initial position. The results reveal similar ordering patterns for children and adults. Word order variation was to a large extent predictable from the type of referring expression, especially with respect to the word order involving the sentence-medial positions. Information structure (e.g., topic status) had an additional impact only on word order variation that involved the sentence-initial position. Two comprehension experiments were conducted to investigate whether the type of referring expression and topic status influences the comprehension of non-canonical transitive sentences in four- and five-year-olds. In the first experiment, the topic status of the one of the sentential arguments was established via a preceding context sentence, and in the second experiment, the type of referring expression for the sentential arguments was additionally manipulated by using either a full lexical noun phrase (NP) or a personal pronoun. The results demonstrate that children's comprehension of non-canonical sentences improved when the topic argument was realized as a personal pronoun and this improvement was independent of the grammatical role of the arguments. However, children's comprehension was not improved when the topic argument was realized as a lexical NP. In sum, the results of both production and comprehension studies support the view that referring expressions may be seen as a sentence-level cue to word order and to the information status of the sentential arguments. The results highlight the important role of the type of referring expression on the acquisition of word order variation and indicate that the production-comprehension asymmetry is reduced when the type of referring expression is considered.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Huttenlauch2023,
  author    = {Huttenlauch, Clara},
  title     = {Individual variability in production and comprehension of prosodically disambiguated structural ambiguities},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-61926},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-619262},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {x, 211},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {Strings of words can correspond to more than one interpretation or underlying structure, which makes them ambiguous. Prosody can be used to resolve this structural ambiguity. This dissertation investigates the use of prosodic cues in the domains of fundamental frequency (f0) and duration to disambiguate between two interpretations of ambiguous structures when speakers addressed different interlocutors. The dissertation comprises of three production studies and one comprehension study. Prosodic disambiguation was studied with a focus on German name sequences of three names (coordinates) in two conditions: without (Name1 and Name2 and Name3) and with internal grouping of the first two names ([Name1 and Name2] and Name3). The study of coordinates was complemented with production data of locally ambiguous sentences with a case-ambiguous first noun phrase. Variability was studied in a controlled setting: Productions were elicited with a within-subject manipulation of context in a referential communication task in order to evoke prosodic adaptations to different conversational contexts. Context had five levels and involved interlocutors in three age groups (child, young adult, elderly adult) with German as L1 in the absence of background white noise, the young adult with background white noise, and a young adult without German as L1. Variability was explored at different levels: within a group of young individuals (intra-group level), within and between young individuals (intra-individual level and inter-individual level, respectively), and comparing between the group of young and a group of older speakers (inter-group level). Our data replicate the use of the three prosodic cues (f0-movement, final lengthening, and pause) in productions of young adult speakers and extend their use to productions of older adult speakers. Both age groups distinguished consistently between the two coordinate conditions. Prosodic grouping in production was evident not only on the group-final Name2 but also at earlier stages in the utterance, on the group-internal Name1 (early cues). For some speakers, some listeners were able to decode these early cues effectively as they were able to reliably predict the upcoming structure after listening to Name1 only. Thus, prosodic grouping appears as a globally marked phenomenon building up along the utterance. The internal structure of coordinates was disambiguated irrespective of the conversational context. In our data, speakers only slightly modified the prosodic cues marking the disambiguation in the different contexts. Listeners were unable to identify to which interlocutor the sequence had been produced. We interpret this intra-individual consistency in the production of disambiguating prosodic cues as support for a strong link between prosody and syntax. The findings support models in favour of situational independence of disambiguating prosody. All speakers reliably marked the distinction between the grouping conditions with at least one of the three prosodic cues investigated and most of the speakers used at least two of these cues. Further, individual differences in prosodic grouping did not lead to difficulties in recovering the grouping in comprehension. Taken together, these findings support the existence of a phonological category of prosodic grouping.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Zona2024,
  author    = {Zona, Carlotta Isabella},
  title     = {Visuo-linguistic integration for thematic-role assignment across speakers},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-63185},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-631857},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {147},
  year      = {2024},
  abstract  = {This dissertation examines the integration of incongruent visual-scene and morphological-case information ("cues") in building thematic-role representations of spoken relative clauses in German. Addressing the mutual influence of visual and linguistic processing, the Coordinated Interplay Account (CIA) describes a mechanism in two steps supporting visuo-linguistic integration (Knoeferle \& Crocker, 2006, Cog Sci). However, the outcomes and dynamics of integrating incongruent thematic-role representations from distinct sources have been investigated scarcely. Further, there is evidence that both second-language (L2) and older speakers may rely on non-syntactic cues relatively more than first-language (L1)/young speakers. Yet, the role of visual information for thematic-role comprehension has not been measured in L2 speakers, and only limitedly across the adult lifespan. Thematically unambiguous canonically ordered (subject-extracted) and noncanonically ordered (object-extracted) spoken relative clauses in German (see 1a-b) were presented in isolation and alongside visual scenes conveying either the same (congruent) or the opposite (incongruent) thematic relations as the sentence did. 1 a Das ist der Koch, der die Braut verfolgt. This is the.NOM cook who.NOM the.ACC bride follows This is the cook who is following the bride. b Das ist der Koch, den die Braut verfolgt. This is the.NOM cook whom.ACC the.NOM bride follows This is the cook whom the bride is following. The relative contribution of each cue to thematic-role representations was assessed with agent identification. Accuracy and latency data were collected post-sentence from a sample of L1 and L2 speakers (Zona \& Felser, 2023), and from a sample of L1 speakers from across the adult lifespan (Zona \& Reifegerste, under review). In addition, the moment-by-moment dynamics of thematic-role assignment were investigated with mouse tracking in a young L1 sample (Zona, under review). The following questions were addressed: (1) How do visual scenes influence thematic-role representations of canonical and noncanonical sentences? (2) How does reliance on visual-scene, case, and word-order cues vary in L1 and L2 speakers? (3) How does reliance on visual-scene, case, and word-order cues change across the lifespan? The results showed reliable effects of incongruence of visually and linguistically conveyed thematic relations on thematic-role representations. Incongruent (vs. congruent) scenes yielded slower and less accurate responses to agent-identification probes presented post-sentence. The recently inspected agent was considered as the most likely agent ~300ms after trial onset, and the convergence of visual scenes and word order enabled comprehenders to assign thematic roles predictively. L2 (vs. L1) participants relied more on word order overall. In response to noncanonical clauses presented with incongruent visual scenes, sensitivity to case predicted the size of incongruence effects better than L1-L2 grouping. These results suggest that the individual's ability to exploit specific cues might predict their weighting. Sensitivity to case was stable throughout the lifespan, while visual effects increased with increasing age and were modulated by individual interference-inhibition levels. Thus, age-related changes in comprehension may stem from stronger reliance on visually (vs. linguistically) conveyed meaning. These patterns represent evidence for a recent-role preference - i.e., a tendency to re-assign visually conveyed thematic roles to the same referents in temporally coordinated utterances. The findings (i) extend the generalizability of CIA predictions across stimuli, tasks, populations, and measures of interest, (ii) contribute to specifying the outcomes and mechanisms of detecting and indexing incongruent representations within the CIA, and (iii) speak to current efforts to understand the sources of variability in sentence comprehension.},
  language  = {en}
}