TY - JOUR A1 - Nakano, Yoko A1 - Ikemoto, Yu A1 - Jacob, Gunnar A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - How Orthography Modulates Morphological Priming: Subliminal Kanji Activation in Japanese JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - The current study investigates to what extent masked morphological priming is modulated by language-particular properties, specifically by its writing system. We present results from two masked priming experiments investigating the processing of complex Japanese words written in less common (moraic) scripts. In Experiment 1, participants performed lexical decisions on target verbs; these were preceded by primes which were either (i) a past-tense form of the same verb, (ii) a stem-related form with the epenthetic vowel-i, (iii) a semantically-related form, and (iv) a phonologically-related form. Significant priming effects were obtained for prime types (i), (ii), and (iii), but not for (iv). This pattern of results differs from previous findings on languages with alphabetic scripts, which found reliable masked priming effects for morphologically related prime/target pairs of type (i), but not for non-affixal and semantically-related primes of types (ii), and (iii). In Experiment 2, we measured priming effects for prime/target pairs which are neither morphologically, semantically, phonologically nor - as presented in their moraic scripts orthographically related, but which in their commonly written form share the same kanji, which are logograms adopted from Chinese. The results showed a significant priming effect, with faster lexical-decision times for kanji-related prime/target pairs relative to unrelated ones. We conclude that affix-stripping is insufficient to account for masked morphological priming effects across languages, but that language-particular properties (in the case of Japanese, the writing system) affect the processing of (morphologically) complex words. KW - morphologically complex words KW - morpho-orthography KW - decompositon KW - Japanese KW - kanji KW - kana Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00316 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 7 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Reifegerste, Jana A1 - Elin, Kirill A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Persistent differences between native speakers and late bilinguals BT - Evidence from inflectional and derivational processing in older speakers JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition N2 - Previous research with younger adults has revealed differences between native (L1) and non-native late-bilingual (L2) speakers with respect to how morphologically complex words are processed. This study examines whether these L1/L2 differences persist into old age. We tested masked-priming effects for derived and inflected word forms in older L1 and L2 speakers of German and compared them to results from younger L1 and L2 speakers on the same experiment (mean ages: 62 vs. 24). We found longer overall response times paired with better accuracy scores for older (L1 and L2) participants than for younger participants. The priming patterns, however, were not affected by chronological age. While both L1 and L2 speakers showed derivational priming, only the L1 speakers demonstrated inflectional priming. We argue that general performance in both L1 and L2 is affected by aging, but that the more profound differences between native and non-native processing persist into old age. KW - aging KW - late bilinguals KW - processing KW - morphology KW - inflection KW - derivation Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728918000615 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 22 IS - 3 SP - 425 EP - 440 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Rothweiler, Monika A1 - Chilla, Solveig A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Subject-verb agreement in specific language impairment BT - a study of monolingual and bilingual German-speaking children JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition. N2 - This study investigates phenomena that have been claimed to be indicative of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in German, focusing on subject-verb agreement marking. Longitudinal data from fourteen German-speaking children with SLI, seven monolingual and seven Turkish-German successive bilingual children, were examined. We found similar patterns of impairment in the two participant groups. Both the monolingual and the bilingual children with SLI had correct (present vs. preterit) tense marking and produced syntactically complex sentences such as embedded clauses and wh-questions, but were limited in reliably producing correct agreement-marked verb forms. These contrasts indicate that agreement marking is impaired in German-speaking children with SLI, without any necessary concurrent deficits in either the CP-domain or in tense marking. Our results also show that it is possible to identify SLI from an early successive bilingual child's performance in one of her two languages. KW - verb morphology KW - tense deficit KW - agreement deficit KW - Turkish-German SLI Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S136672891100037X SN - 1366-7289 VL - 15 IS - 1 SP - 39 EP - 57 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Ruberg, Tobias A1 - Rothweiler, Monika A1 - Veríssimo, João Marques A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Childhood bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment BT - A study of the CP-domain in German SLI T2 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - This study addresses the question of whether and how growing up with more than one language shapes a child's language impairment. Our focus is on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual (Turkish-German) children. We specifically investigated a range of phenomena related to the so-called CP (Complementizer Phrase) in German, the hierarchically highest layer of syntactic clause structure, which has been argued to be particularly affected in children with SLI. Spontaneous speech data were examined from bilingual children with SLI in comparison to two comparison groups: (i) typically-developing bilingual children, (ii) monolingual children with SLI. We found that despite persistent difficulty with subject-verb agreement, the two groups of children with SLI did not show any impairment of the CP-domain. We conclude that while subject-verb agreement is a suitable linguistic marker of SLI in German-speaking children, for both monolingual and bilingual ones, 'vulnerability of the CP-domain' is not. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 870 KW - developmental language impairment KW - specific language impairment KW - child second language acquisition KW - syntax KW - agreement Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-518095 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 3 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ruberg, Tobias A1 - Rothweiler, Monika A1 - Veríssimo, João Marques A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Childhood bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment BT - A study of the CP-domain in German SLI JF - Bilingualism: Language and Cognition N2 - This study addresses the question of whether and how growing up with more than one language shapes a child's language impairment. Our focus is on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual (Turkish-German) children. We specifically investigated a range of phenomena related to the so-called CP (Complementizer Phrase) in German, the hierarchically highest layer of syntactic clause structure, which has been argued to be particularly affected in children with SLI. Spontaneous speech data were examined from bilingual children with SLI in comparison to two comparison groups: (i) typically-developing bilingual children, (ii) monolingual children with SLI. We found that despite persistent difficulty with subject-verb agreement, the two groups of children with SLI did not show any impairment of the CP-domain. We conclude that while subject-verb agreement is a suitable linguistic marker of SLI in German-speaking children, for both monolingual and bilingual ones, 'vulnerability of the CP-domain' is not. KW - developmental language impairment KW - specific language impairment KW - child second language acquisition KW - syntax KW - agreement Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000580 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 23 IS - 3 SP - 668 EP - 680 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Silva, Renita A1 - Gerth, Sabrina A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Morphological constraints in children's spoken language comprehension - a visual world study of plurals inside compounds in English JF - Cognition : international journal of cognitive science N2 - Many previous studies have shown that the human language processor is capable of rapidly integrating information from different sources during reading or listening. Yet, little is known about how this ability develops from child to adulthood. To gain insight into how children (in comparison to adults) handle different kinds of linguistic information during on-line language comprehension, the current study investigates a well-known morphological phenomenon that is subject to both structural and semantic constraints, the plurals-in-compounds effect, i.e. the dislike of plural (specifically regular plural) modifiers inside compounds (e.g. rats eater). We examined 96 seven-to-twelve-year-old children and a control group of 32 adults measuring their eye-gaze changes in response to compound-internal plural and singular forms. Our results indicate that children rely more upon structural properties of language (in the present case, morphological cues) early in development and that the ability to efficiently integrate information from multiple sources takes time for children to reach adult-like levels. KW - Developmental morphology KW - Compounding KW - Visual world paradigm KW - Eye movements KW - Morphological processing Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.08.003 SN - 0010-0277 SN - 1873-7838 VL - 129 IS - 2 SP - 457 EP - 469 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Uygun, Serkan A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Morphological processing in heritage speakers BT - a masked priming study on the Turkish aorist JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition N2 - Previous research has shown that heritage speakers struggle with inflectional morphology. 'Limitations of online resources' for processing a non-dominant language has been claimed as one possible reason for these difficulties. To date, however, there is very little experimental evidence on real-time language processing in heritage speakers. Here we report results from a masked priming experiment with 97 bilingual (Turkish/German) heritage speakers and a control group of 40 non-heritage speakers of Turkish examining regular and irregular forms of the Turkish aorist. We found that, for the regular aorist, heritage speakers use the same morphological decomposition mechanism ('affix stripping') as control speakers, whereas for processing irregularly inflected forms they exhibited more variability (i.e., less homogeneous performance) than the control group. Heritage speakers also demonstrated semantic priming effects. At a more general level, these results indicate that heritage speakers draw on multiple sources of information for recognizing morphologically complex words. KW - Turkish KW - morphology KW - aorist KW - priming KW - variability KW - processing Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728920000577 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 24 IS - 3 SP - 415 EP - 426 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Verissimo, Joao Marques A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Variables and similarity in linguistic generalization: Evidence from inflectional classes in Portuguese JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - Two opposing viewpoints have been advanced to account for morphological productivity, one according to which some knowledge is couched in the form of operations over variables, and another in which morphological generalization is primarily determined by similarity. We investigated this controversy by examining the generalization of Portuguese verb stems, which fall into one of three conjugation classes. In Study 1, an elicited production task revealed that the generalization of 2nd and 3rd conjugation stems is influenced by the degree of phonological similarity between novel roots and existing verbs, whereas the 1st conjugation generalizes beyond similarity. In Study 2, we directly contrasted two distinct computational implementations of conjugation class assignment in how well they matched the human data: a similarity-driven model that captures phonological similarities, and a dual-mechanism model that implements an explicit distinction between context-free and similarity-based generalizations. The similarity-driven model consistently underestimated 1st conjugation responses and overestimated proportions of 2nd and 3rd conjugation responses, especially for novel verbs that are highly similar to existing verbs of those classes. In contrast, the expected proportions produced by the dual-mechanism model were statistically indistinguishable from human responses. We conclude that both context-free and context-sensitive processes determine the generalization of conjugations in Portuguese, and that similarity-based algorithms of morphological acquisition are insufficient to exhibit default-like generalization. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. KW - Variables KW - Similarity KW - Rules KW - Morphological generalization KW - Productivity KW - Computational modeling Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2014.06.001 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 76 SP - 61 EP - 79 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER -