@phdthesis{Pregla2023,
  author    = {Pregla, Dorothea},
  title     = {Variability in sentence processing performance in German people with aphasia and unimpaired German native speakers},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-61420},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-614201},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {171},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {Individuals with aphasia vary in the speed and accuracy they perform sentence comprehension tasks. Previous results indicate that the performance patterns of individuals with aphasia vary between tasks (e.g., Caplan, DeDe, \& Michaud, 2006; Caplan, Michaud, \& Hufford, 2013a). Similarly, it has been found that the comprehension performance of individuals with aphasia varies between homogeneous test sentences within and between sessions (e.g., McNeil, Hageman, \& Matthews, 2005). These studies ascribed the variability in the performance of individuals with aphasia to random noise. This conclusion would be in line with an influential theory on sentence comprehension in aphasia, the resource reduction hypothesis (Caplan, 2012). However, previous studies did not directly compare variability in language-impaired and language-unimpaired adults. Thus, it is still unclear how the variability in sentence comprehension differs between individuals with and without aphasia. Furthermore, the previous studies were exclusively carried out in English. Therefore, the findings on variability in sentence processing in English still need to be replicated in a different language. This dissertation aims to give a systematic overview of the patterns of variability in sentence comprehension performance in aphasia in German and, based on this overview, to put the resource reduction hypothesis to the test. In order to reach the first aim, variability was considered on three different dimensions (persons, measures, and occasions) following the classification by Hultsch, Strauss, Hunter, and MacDonald (2011). At the dimension of persons, the thesis compared the performance of individuals with aphasia and language-unimpaired adults. At the dimension of measures, this work explored the performance across different sentence comprehension tasks (object manipulation, sentence-picture matching). Finally, at the dimension of occasions, this work compared the performance in each task between two test sessions. Several methods were combined to study variability to gain a large and diverse database. In addition to the offline comprehension tasks, the self-paced-listening paradigm and the visual world eye-tracking paradigm were used in this work. The findings are in line with the previous results. As in the previous studies, variability in sentence comprehension in individuals with aphasia emerged between test sessions and between tasks. Additionally, it was possible to characterize the variability further using hierarchical Bayesian models. For individuals with aphasia, it was shown that both between-task and between-session variability are unsystematic. In contrast to that, language-unimpaired individuals exhibited systematic differences between measures and between sessions. However, these systematic differences occurred only in the offline tasks. Hence, variability in sentence comprehension differed between language-impaired and language-unimpaired adults, and this difference could be narrowed down to the offline measures. Based on this overview of the patterns of variability, the resource reduction hypothesis was evaluated. According to the hypothesis, the variability in the performance of individuals with aphasia can be ascribed to random fluctuations in the resources available for sentence processing. Given that the performance of the individuals with aphasia varied unsystematically, the results support the resource reduction hypothesis. Furthermore, the thesis proposes that the differences in variability between language-impaired and language-unimpaired adults can also be explained by the resource reduction hypothesis. More specifically, it is suggested that the systematic changes in the performance of language-unimpaired adults are due to decreasing fluctuations in available processing resources. In parallel, the unsystematic variability in the performance of individuals with aphasia could be due to constant fluctuations in available processing resources. In conclusion, the systematic investigation of variability contributes to a better understanding of language processing in aphasia and thus enriches aphasia research.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Burmester2019,
  author    = {Burmester, Juliane},
  title     = {Linguistic and visual salience in sentence comprehension},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-44315},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-443155},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {XI, 165},
  year      = {2019},
  abstract  = {Interlocutors typically link their utterances to the discourse environment and enrich communication by linguistic (e.g., information packaging) and extra-linguistic (e.g., eye gaze, gestures) means to optimize information transfer. Psycholinguistic studies underline that ‒for meaning computation‒ listeners profit from linguistic and visual cues that draw their focus of attention to salient information. This dissertation is the first work that examines how linguistic compared to visual salience cues influence sentence comprehension using the very same experimental paradigms and materials, that is, German subject-before-object (SO) and object-before-subject (OS) sentences, across the two cue modalities. Linguistic salience was induced by indicating a referent as the aboutness topic. Visual salience was induced by implicit (i.e., unconscious) or explicit (i.e., shared) manipulations of listeners' attention to a depicted referent. In Study 1, a selective, facilitative impact of linguistic salience on the context-sensitive OS word order was found using offline comprehensibility judgments. More precisely, during online sentence processing, this impact was characterized by a reduced sentence-initial Late positivity which reflects reduced processing costs for updating the current mental representation of discourse. This facilitative impact of linguistic salience was not replicated by means of an implicit visual cue (Study 2) shown to modulate word order preferences during sentence production. However, a gaze shift to a depicted referent as an indicator of shared attention eased sentence-initial processing similar to linguistic salience as revealed by reduced reading times (Study 3). Yet, this cue did not modulate the strong subject-antecedent preference during later pronoun resolution like linguistic salience. Taken together, these findings suggest a significant impact of linguistic and visual salience cues on sentence comprehension, which substantiates that both the information delivered via language and via the visual environment is integrated into the mental representation of the discourse; but, the way how salience is induced is crucial to its impact.},
  language  = {en}
}
@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}
}