TY  - JOUR
A1  - Zimmermann, Malte
T1  - Wird Schon Stimmen!
BT  - A Degree Operator Analysis of Schon
JF  - Journal of semantics
N2  - The article puts forward a novel analysis of the German modal particle schon as a modal degree operator over propositional content. The proposed analysis offers a uniform perspective on the semantics of modal schon and its aspectual counterpart meaning ‘already’: Both particles are analyzed as denoting a degree operator, expressing a scale-based comparison over relevant alternatives. The alternatives are determined by focus in the case of aspectual schon (Krifka 2000), but are restricted to the polar alternatives p and ¬p in the case of modal schon. Semantically, modal schon introduces a presupposition to the effect that the circumstantial conversational background contains more factual evidence in favor of p than in favor of ¬p⁠, thereby making modal schon the not at-issue counterpart of the overt comparative form eher ‘rather’ (Herburger & Rubinstein 2014). The analysis incorporates basic insights from earlier analyses of modal schon in a novel way, and it also offers new insights as to the underlying workings of modality in natural language as involving propositions rather than possible worlds (Kratzer 1977, 2012).
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffy010
SN  - 0167-5133
SN  - 1477-4593
VL  - 35
IS  - 4
SP  - 687
EP  - 739
PB  - Oxford Univ. Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Garcia, Rowena
A1  - Dery, Jeruen E.
A1  - Roeser, Jens
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children
JF  - First language
N2  - This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the children produced mainly agent-initial constructions regardless of voice. This agent-initial preference, despite the lack of a close link between the agent and the subject in Tagalog, shows that this word order preference is not merely syntactically-driven (subject-initial preference). Additionally, the children’s agent-initial preference in the agent voice, contrary to the adults’ lack of preference, shows that children do not respect the subject-last principle of ordering Tagalog full noun phrases. These results suggest that language-specific optional features like a subject-last principle take longer to be acquired.
KW  - Child language acquisition
KW  - sentence production
KW  - Tagalog acquisition
KW  - voice
KW  - word order
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723718790317
SN  - 0142-7237
SN  - 1740-2344
VL  - 38
IS  - 6
SP  - 617
EP  - 640
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Fyndanis, Valantis
A1  - Arcara, Giorgio
A1  - Christidou, Paraskevi
A1  - Caplan, David
T1  - Morphosyntactic production and verbal working memory
BT  - evidence from greek aphasia and healthy aging
JF  - Journal of speech, language, and hearing research
N2  - Method: A sentence completion task testing production of subject-verb agreement, tense/time reference, and aspect in local and nonlocal conditions and two verbal WM tasks were administered to 8 Greek-speaking persons with agrammatic aphasia (PWA) and 103 healthy participants. Results: The 3 morphosyntactic categories dissociated in both groups (agreement > tense > aspect). A significant interaction emerged in both groups between the 3 morphosyntactic categories and WM. There was no main effect of locality in either of the 2 groups. At the individual level, all 8 PWA exhibited dissociations between agreement, tense, and aspect, and effects of locality were contradictory.
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1044/2018_JSLHR-L-17-0103
SN  - 1092-4388
SN  - 1558-9102
VL  - 61
IS  - 5
SP  - 1171
EP  - 1187
PB  - American Speech-Language-Hearing Assoc.
CY  - Rockville
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Fernandez, Leigh
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Brock, Jon
A1  - Nickels, Lyndsey
T1  - Investigating auditory processing of syntactic gaps with L2 speakers using pupillometry
JF  - Second language research
N2  - According to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), second language (L2) speakers, unlike native speakers, build shallow syntactic representations during sentence processing. In order to test the SSH, this study investigated the processing of a syntactic movement in both native speakers of English and proficient late L2 speakers of English using pupillometry to measure processing cost. Of particular interest were constructions where movement resulted in an intermediate gap between clauses. Pupil diameter was recorded during auditory presentation of complex syntactic constructions. Two factors were manipulated: syntactic movement (such that some conditions contained movement while others did not), as well as syntactic movement type (either causing an intermediate gap or not). Grammaticality judgments revealed no differences between the two groups, suggesting both were capable of comprehending these constructions. Pupil change slope measurements revealed a potential sensitivity to intermediate gaps for only native speakers, however, both native and late L2 speakers showed similar facilitation during processing of the second gap site. Acoustic analysis revealed potential acoustic cues that may have facilitated the processing of these constructions. This suggests that, contrary to the predictions of the SSH, late L2 speakers are capable of constructing rich syntactic representations during the processing of intermediate gap constructions in spoken language.
KW  - filler gap dependency
KW  - intermediate gap
KW  - L2 sentence processing
KW  - pupillometry
KW  - shallow structure hypothesis
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658317722386
SN  - 0267-6583
SN  - 1477-0326
VL  - 34
IS  - 2
SP  - 201
EP  - 227
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Fyndanis, Valantis
A1  - Arcara, Giorgio
A1  - Capasso, Rita
A1  - Christidou, Paraskevi
A1  - De Pellegrin, Serena
A1  - Gandolfi, Marialuisa
A1  - Messinis, Lambros
A1  - Panagea, Evgenia
A1  - Papathanasopoulos, Panagiotis
A1  - Smania, Nicola
A1  - Semenza, Carlo
A1  - Miceli, Gabriele
T1  - Time reference in nonfluent and fluent aphasia
BT  - a cross-linguistic test of the PAst Discourse Linking Hypothesis
JF  - Clinical linguistics & phonetics
N2  - Recent studies by Bastiaanse and colleagues found that time reference is selectively impaired in people with nonfluent agrammatic aphasia, with reference to the past being more difficult to process than reference to the present or to the future. To account for this dissociation, they formulated the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH), which posits that past reference is more demanding than present/future reference because it involves discourse linking. There is some evidence that this hypothesis can be applied to people with fluent aphasia as well. However, the existing evidence for the PADILIH is contradictory, and most of it has been provided by employing a test that predominantly taps retrieval processes, leaving largely unexplored the underlying ability to encode time reference-related prephonological features. Within a cross-linguistic approach, this study tests the PADILIH by means of a sentence completion task that 'equally' taps encoding and retrieval abilities. This study also investigates if the PADILIH’s scope can be extended to fluent aphasia. Greek- and Italian-speaking individuals with aphasia participated in the study. The Greek group consisted of both individuals with nonfluent agrammatic aphasia and individuals with fluent aphasia, who also presented signs of agrammatism. The Italian group consisted of individuals with agrammatic nonfluent aphasia only. The two Greek subgroups performed similarly. Neither language group of participants with aphasia exhibited a pattern of performance consistent with the predictions of the PADILIH. However, a double dissociation observed within the Greek group suggests a hypothesis that may reconcile the present results with the PADILIH.
KW  - Time reference
KW  - past reference
KW  - future reference
KW  - encoding
KW  - retrieval
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2018.1445291
SN  - 0269-9206
SN  - 1464-5076
VL  - 32
IS  - 9
SP  - 823
EP  - 843
PB  - Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Philadelphia
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - van der Kant, Anne
A1  - Biro, Szilvia
A1  - Levelt, Claartje
A1  - Huijbregts, Stephan
T1  - Negative affect is related to reduced differential neural responses to social and non-social stimuli in 5-to-8-month-old infants
BT  - a functional near-infrared spectroscopy-study
JF  - Developmental cognitive neuroscience : a journal for cognitive, affective and social developmental neuroscience
N2  - Both social perception and temperament in young infants have been related to social functioning later in life. Previous functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) data (Lloyd-Fox et al., 2009) showed larger blood-oxygenation changes for social compared to non-social stimuli in the posterior temporal cortex of five-month-old infants. We sought to replicate and extend these findings by using fNIRS to study the neural basis of social perception in relation to infant temperament (Negative Affect) in 37 five-to-eight-month-old infants. Infants watched short videos displaying either hand and facial movements of female actors (social dynamic condition) or moving toys and machinery (non-social dynamic condition), while fNIRS data were collected over temporal brain regions. Negative Affect was measured using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire. Results showed significantly larger blood-oxygenation changes in the right posterior-temporal region in the social compared to the non-social condition. Furthermore, this differential activation was smaller in infants showing higher Negative Affect. Our results replicate those of Lloyd-Fox et al. and confirmed that five-to-eight-month-old infants show cortical specialization for social perception. Furthermore, the decreased cortical sensitivity to social stimuli in infants showing high Negative Affect may be an early biomarker for later difficulties in social interaction.
KW  - Functional near-infrared spectroscopy
KW  - fNIRS
KW  - Social perception
KW  - Infants
KW  - Temperament
KW  - Negative affect
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2017.12.003
SN  - 1878-9293
SN  - 1878-9307
VL  - 30
SP  - 23
EP  - 30
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Chen, Aoju
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Four- to five-year-old' use of word order and prosody in focus marking in Dutch
JF  - Linguistics Vanguard
N2  - This study investigated Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in distinguishing focus types (broad focus, narrow focus, and contrastive narrow focus) via an interactive answer-reconstruction game. We have found an overall preference for the unmarked word order SVO and no evidence for the use of OVS to distinguish focus types. But the children used pitch and duration in the subject-nouns to distinguish focus types in SVO sentences. These findings show that Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds differ from their German- and Finnish-speaking peers, who show evidence of varying choice of word order to mark specific focus types, and use prosody to distinguish focus types in subject and object nouns in both SVO and OVS sentences. These comparisons suggest that typological differences in the relative importance between word order and prosody can lead to differences in children’s use of word order and prosody in unmarked and marked word orders. A more equal role of word order and prosody in the ambient language can stimulate more extensive use of prosody in the marked word order, whereas a more limited role of word order can restrict the use of prosody in the unmarked word order.
KW  - information structure
KW  - Dutch-speaking children
KW  - word order
KW  - prosody
KW  - focus
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2016-0101
SN  - 2199-174X
VL  - 4
PB  - De Gruyter
CY  - Berlin
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Haendler, Yair
A1  - Adani, Flavia
T1  - Testing the effect of an arbitrary subject pronoun on relative clause comprehension
BT  - a study with Hebrew-speaking children
JF  - Journal of child language
N2  - Previous studies have found that Hebrew-speaking children accurately comprehend object relatives (OR) with an embedded non-referential arbitrary subject pronoun (ASP). The facilitation of ORs with embedded pronouns is expected both from a discourse-pragmatics perspective and within a syntax-based locality approach. However, the specific effect of ASP might also be driven by a mismatch in grammatical features between the head noun and the pronoun, or by its relatively undemanding referential properties. We tested these possibilities by comparing ORs whose embedded subject is either ASP, a referential pronoun, or a lexical noun phrase. In all conditions, grammatical features were controlled. In a referent-identification task, the matching features made ORs with embedded pronouns difficult for five-year-olds. Accuracy was particularly low when the embedded pronoun was referential. These results indicate that embedded pronouns do not facilitate ORs across the board, and that the referential properties of pronouns affect OR processing.
KW  - relative clauses
KW  - pronouns
KW  - referentiality
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000917000599
SN  - 0305-0009
SN  - 1469-7602
VL  - 45
IS  - 4
SP  - 959
EP  - 980
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Abakarova, Dzhuma
A1  - Iskarous, Khalil
A1  - Noiray, Aude
T1  - Quantifying lingual coarticulation in German using mutual information
BT  - an ultrasound study
JF  - The journal of the Acoustical Society of America
N2  - In previous research, mutual information (MI) was employed to quantify the physical information shared between consecutive phonological segments, based on electromagnetic articulography data. In this study, MI is extended to quantifying coarticulatory resistance (CR) versus overlap in German using ultrasound imaging. Two measurements are tested as input to MI: (1) the highest point on the tongue body and (2) the first coefficient of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of the whole tongue contour. Both measures are used to examine changes in coarticulation between two time points during the syllable span: the consonant midpoint and the vowel onset. Results corroborate previous findings reporting differences in coarticulatory overlap in German and across languages. Further, results suggest that MI used with the highest point on the tongue body captures distinctions related both to place and manner of articulation, while the first DFT coefficient does not provide any additional information regarding global (whole tongue) as opposed to local (individual articulator) aspects of CR. However, both methods capture temporal distinctions in coarticulatory resistance between the two time points. Results are discussed with respect to the potential of MI measure to provide a way of unifying coarticulation quantification methods across data collection techniques.
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5047669
SN  - 0001-4966
SN  - 1520-8524
VL  - 144
IS  - 2
SP  - 897
EP  - 907
PB  - American Institute of Physics
CY  - Melville
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ronasi, Golnoush
A1  - Fischer, Martin H.
A1  - Zimmermann, Malte
T1  - Language and Arithmetic
BT  - a failure to find cross cognitive domain semantic priming between exception phrases and subtraction or addition
JF  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - We examined cross-domain semantic priming effects between arithmetic and language. We paired subtractions with their linguistic equivalent, exception phrases (EPs) with positive quantifiers (e.g., "everybody except John") while pairing additions with their own linguistic equivalent, EPs with negative quantifiers (e.g., "nobody except John"; Moltmann, 1995). We hypothesized that EPs with positive quantifiers prime subtractions and inhibit additions while EPs with negative quantifiers prime additions and inhibit subtractions. Furthermore, we expected similar priming and inhibition effects from arithmetic into semantics. Our design allowed for a bidirectional analysis by using one trial's target as the prime for the next trial. Two experiments failed to show significant priming effects in either direction. Implications and possible shortcomings are explored in the general discussion.
KW  - cross-domain priming
KW  - language
KW  - arithmetic
KW  - information integration
KW  - cognitive module
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01524
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 9
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -