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 - Abusch, Dorit T1 - Focus presuppositions N2 - This paper reviews notions related to focus and presupposition and addresses the hypothesis that focus triggers an existential presupposition. Presupposition projection behavior in certain examples appears to favor a presuppositional analysis of focus. It is argued that these examples are open to a different analysis using givenness theory. Overall, the analysis favors a weak semantics for focus not including an existential presupposition. KW - focus KW - presupposition KW - alternative semantics presupposition projection KW - givenness Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19663 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Adani, Flavia A1 - Forgiarini, Matteo A1 - Guasti, Maria Teresa A1 - Van der Lely, Heather K. J. T1 - Number dissimilarities facilitate the comprehension of relative clauses in children with (Grammatical) Specific Language Impairment JF - Journal of child language N2 - This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject-and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12; 11) with that of two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children, matched on grammar and receptive vocabulary, respectively. All groups were more accurate on subject-extracted relative clauses than object-extracted ones and, crucially, they all showed greater accuracy for sentences with dissimilar number features (i.e., one singular, one plural) on the head noun and the embedded DP. These findings are interpreted in the light of current psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in TD children and provide further insight into the linguistic nature of G-SLI. Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000913000184 SN - 0305-0009 SN - 1469-7602 VL - 41 IS - 4 SP - 811 EP - 841 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Adani, Flavia A1 - Stegenwallner-Schutz, Maja Henny Katherine A1 - Niesel, Talea T1 - The Peaceful Co-existence of Input Frequency and Structural Intervention Effects on the Comprehension of Complex Sentences in German-Speaking Children JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - The predictions of two contrasting approaches to the acquisition of transitive relative clauses were tested within the same groups of German-speaking participants aged from 3 to 5 years old. The input frequency approach predicts that object relative clauses with inanimate heads (e.g., the pullover that the man is scratching) are comprehended earlier and more accurately than those with an animate head (e.g., the man that the boy is scratching). In contrast, the structural intervention approach predicts that object relative clauses with two full NP arguments mismatching in number (e.g., the man that the boys are scratching) are comprehended earlier and more accurately than those with number-matching NPs (e.g., the man that the boy is scratching). These approaches were tested in two steps. First, we ran a corpus analysis to ensure that object relative clauses with number-mismatching NPs are not more frequent than object relative clauses with number-matching NPs in child directed speech. Next, the comprehension of these structures was tested experimentally in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds respectively by means of a color naming task. By comparing the predictions of the two approaches within the same participant groups, we were able to uncover that the effects predicted by the input frequency and by the structural intervention approaches co-exist and that they both influence the performance of children on transitive relative clauses, but in a manner that is modulated by age. These results reveal a sensitivity to animacy mismatch already being demonstrated by 3-year-olds and show that animacy is initially deployed more reliably than number to interpret relative clauses correctly. In all age groups, the animacy mismatch appears to explain the performance of children, thus, showing that the comprehension of frequent object relative clauses is enhanced compared to the other conditions. Starting with 4-year-olds but especially in 5-year-olds, the number mismatch supported comprehension-a facilitation that is unlikely to be driven by input frequency. Once children fine-tune their sensitivity to verb agreement information around the age of four, they are also able to deploy number marking to overcome the intervention effects. This study highlights the importance of testing experimentally contrasting theoretical approaches in order to characterize the multifaceted, developmental nature of language acquisition. KW - relative clauses KW - sentence comprehension KW - input frequency KW - number KW - animacy KW - language acquisition KW - German Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01590 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 8 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Adani, Flavia A1 - van der Lely, Heather K. J. A1 - Forgiarini, Matteo A1 - Guasti, Maria Teresa T1 - Grammatical feature dissimilarities make relative clauses easier : a comprehension study with Italian children N2 - The Relativized Minimality approach to A'-dependencies (Friedmann et al., 2009) predicts that headed object relative clauses (RCs) and which questions are the most difficult, due to the presence of a lexical restriction on both the subject and the object DP which creates intervention. We investigated comprehension of center-embedded headed object RCs with Italian children, where Number and Gender feature values on subject and object DPs are manipulated. We found that. Number conditions are always more accurate than Gender ones, showing that intervention is sensitive to DP-internal structure. We propose a finer definition of the lexical restriction where external and syntactically active features (such as Number) reduce intervention whereas internal and (possibly) lexicalized features (such as Gender) do so to a lesser extent. Our results are also compatible with a memory interference approach in which the human parser is sensitive to highly specific properties of the linguistic input, such as the cue-based model (Van Dyke, 2007). Y1 - 2010 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00243841 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2010.03.018 SN - 0024-3841 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Albert, Aviad A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno T1 - Modeling sonority in terms of pitch intelligibility with the nucleus attraction principle JF - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society N2 - Sonority is a fundamental notion in phonetics and phonology, central to many descriptions of the syllable and various useful predictions in phonotactics. Although widely accepted, sonority lacks a clear basis in speech articulation or perception, given that traditional formal principles in linguistic theory are often exclusively based on discrete units in symbolic representation and are typically not designed to be compatible with auditory perception, sensorimotor control, or general cognitive capacities. In addition, traditional sonority principles also exhibit systematic gaps in empirical coverage. Against this backdrop, we propose the incorporation of symbol-based and signal-based models to adequately account for sonority in a complementary manner. We claim that sonority is primarily a perceptual phenomenon related to pitch, driving the optimization of syllables as pitch-bearing units in all language systems. We suggest a measurable acoustic correlate for sonority in terms of periodic energy, and we provide a novel principle that can account for syllabic well-formedness, the nucleus attraction principle (NAP). We present perception experiments that test our two NAP-based models against four traditional sonority models, and we use a Bayesian data analysis approach to test and compare them. Our symbolic NAP model outperforms all the other models we test, while our continuous bottom-up NAP model is at second place, along with the best performing traditional models. We interpret the results as providing strong support for our proposals: (i) the designation of periodic energy as the acoustic correlate of sonority; (ii) the incorporation of continuous entities in phonological models of perception; and (iii) the dual-model strategy that separately analyzes symbol-based top-down processes and signal-based bottom-up processes in speech perception. KW - Sonority KW - Pitch intelligibility KW - Periodic energy KW - Bayesian data KW - analysis KW - Speech perception KW - Phonetics and phonology Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13161 SN - 0364-0213 SN - 1551-6709 VL - 46 IS - 7 PB - Wiley CY - Hoboken ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Aldrup, Marit T1 - Well let me put it uhm the other way around maybe’ BT - Managing students’ trouble displays in the CLIL classroom JF - Classroom discourse N2 - This study is concerned with repair practices that a teacher and students employ to restore intersubjectivity when faced with interactional problems in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classroom. Adopting a conversation analytic (CA) approach, it examines the interactional treatment of students’ verbal and embodied trouble displays in a video-recorded, teacher-fronted geography lesson held in English at a German high school. At the same time, it explores to what extent the repair practices employed are fitted to this specific interactional context. The analysis shows that students’ verbal trouble displays often result in extensive repair sequences, whereas students’ embodied trouble displays are usually met with teacher self-repair in the transition space. In this way, the latter are resolved much earlier and more quickly. The study further reveals practices like reformulation and translation to be especially useful for repairing interactional problems in classrooms in which a foreign language is used as the medium of instruction. The findings may be of interest for prospective as well as practicing teachers in that they provide relevant insights into how interactional trouble can be successfully managed in (CLIL) classroom interaction. KW - Trouble displays KW - repair KW - embodiment KW - classroom interaction KW - conversation analysis Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2019.1567360 SN - 1946-3014 SN - 1946-3022 VL - 10 IS - 1 SP - 46 EP - 70 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Alexiadou, Artemis T1 - A form-function mismatch? BT - The case of Greek deponents JF - Of trees and birds. A Festschrift for Gisbert Fanselow KW - Festschrift KW - Informationsstruktur KW - Linguistik KW - Morphologie KW - Syntax KW - festschrift KW - information structure KW - linguistics KW - morphology KW - syntax Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-432235 SN - 978-3-86956-457-9 SP - 107 EP - 117 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Allefeld, Carsten A1 - Frisch, Stefan A1 - Schlesewsky, Matthias T1 - Detection of early cognitive processing by event-related phase synchronization analysis N2 - In order to investigate the temporal characteristics of cognitive processing, we apply multivariate phase synchronization analysis to event-related potentials. The experimental design combines a semantic incongruity in a sentence context with a physical mismatch (color change). In the ERP average, these result in an N400 component and a P300-like positivity, respectively. Synchronization analysis shows an effect of global desynchronization in the theta band around 288 ms after stimulus presentation for the semantic incongruity, while the physical mismatch elicits an increase of global synchronization in the alpha band around 204 ms. Both of these effects clearly precede those in the ERP aver-age. Moreover, the delay between synchronization effect and ERP component correlates with the complexity Of the cognitive processes. (C) 2005 Lippincott Williams Wilkins Y1 - 2005 SN - 0959-4965 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Alxatib, Sam A1 - Sauerland, Ulrich T1 - Vagueness JF - The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics N2 - Though vague phenomena have been studied extensively for many decades, it is only in recent years that researchers sought the support of quantitative data. This chapter highlights and discusses the insights that experimental methods brought to the study of vagueness. One area focused on are ‘borderline contradictions’, that is, sentences like ‘She is neither tall nor not tall’ that are contradictory when analysed in classical logic, but are actually acceptable as descriptions of borderline cases. The flourishing of theories and experimental studies that borderline contradictions have led to are examined closely. Beyond this illustrative case, an overview of recent studies that concern the classification of types of vagueness, the use of numbers, rounding, number modification, and the general pragmatic status of vagueness is provided. KW - vagueness KW - gradability KW - categories KW - borderline cases KW - contradiction KW - valency KW - imprecision KW - hysteresis KW - pragmatics KW - semantics Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198791768.013.24 PB - Oxford University Press CY - Oxford ER -