TY - GEN A1 - Offrede, Tom F. A1 - Jacobi, Jidde A1 - Rebernik, Teja A1 - de Jong, Lisanne A1 - Keulen, Stefanie A1 - Veenstra, Pauline A1 - Noiray, Aude A1 - Wieling, Martijn T1 - The impact of alcohol on L1 versus L2 T2 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Alcohol intoxication is known to affect many aspects of human behavior and cognition; one of such affected systems is articulation during speech production. Although much research has revealed that alcohol negatively impacts pronunciation in a first language (L1), there is only initial evidence suggesting a potential beneficial effect of inebriation on articulation in a non-native language (L2). The aim of this study was thus to compare the effect of alcohol consumption on pronunciation in an L1 and an L2. Participants who had ingested different amounts of alcohol provided speech samples in their L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English), and native speakers of each language subsequently rated the pronunciation of these samples on their intelligibility (for the L1) and accent nativelikeness (for the L2). These data were analyzed with generalized additive mixed modeling. Participants' blood alcohol concentration indeed negatively affected pronunciation in L1, but it produced no significant effect on the L2 accent ratings. The expected negative impact of alcohol on L1 articulation can be explained by reduction in fine motor control. We present two hypotheses to account for the absence of any effects of intoxication on L2 pronunciation: (1) there may be a reduction in L1 interference on L2 speech due to decreased motor control or (2) alcohol may produce a differential effect on each of the two linguistic subsystems. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 848 KW - acute alcohol consumption KW - articulation KW - speech KW - bilingualism Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-540955 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 3 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Offrede, Tom F. A1 - Jacobi, Jidde A1 - Rebernik, Teja A1 - de Jong, Lisanne A1 - Keulen, Stefanie A1 - Veenstra, Pauline A1 - Noiray, Aude A1 - Wieling, Martijn T1 - The impact of alcohol on L1 versus L2 JF - Language and Speech N2 - Alcohol intoxication is known to affect many aspects of human behavior and cognition; one of such affected systems is articulation during speech production. Although much research has revealed that alcohol negatively impacts pronunciation in a first language (L1), there is only initial evidence suggesting a potential beneficial effect of inebriation on articulation in a non-native language (L2). The aim of this study was thus to compare the effect of alcohol consumption on pronunciation in an L1 and an L2. Participants who had ingested different amounts of alcohol provided speech samples in their L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English), and native speakers of each language subsequently rated the pronunciation of these samples on their intelligibility (for the L1) and accent nativelikeness (for the L2). These data were analyzed with generalized additive mixed modeling. Participants' blood alcohol concentration indeed negatively affected pronunciation in L1, but it produced no significant effect on the L2 accent ratings. The expected negative impact of alcohol on L1 articulation can be explained by reduction in fine motor control. We present two hypotheses to account for the absence of any effects of intoxication on L2 pronunciation: (1) there may be a reduction in L1 interference on L2 speech due to decreased motor control or (2) alcohol may produce a differential effect on each of the two linguistic subsystems. KW - acute alcohol consumption KW - articulation KW - speech KW - bilingualism Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830920953169 SN - 1756-6053 SN - 0023-8309 VL - 64 IS - 3 SP - 681 EP - 692 PB - SAGE Publications CY - Thousand Oaks ER - TY - GEN A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban A1 - Poppels, Till A1 - Levy, Roger P. T1 - Implicit gender bias in linguistic descriptions for expected events BT - the cases of the 2016 United States and 2017 United Kingdom elections T2 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Gender stereotypes influence subjective beliefs about the world, and this is reflected in our use of language. But do gender biases in language transparently reflect subjective beliefs? Or is the process of translating thought to language itself biased? During the 2016 United States (N = 24,863) and 2017 United Kingdom (N = 2,609) electoral campaigns, we compared participants' beliefs about the gender of the next head of government with their use and interpretation of pronouns referring to the next head of government. In the United States, even when the female candidate was expected to win, she pronouns were rarely produced and induced substantial comprehension disruption. In the United Kingdom, where the incumbent female candidate was heavily favored, she pronouns were preferred in production but yielded no comprehension advantage. These and other findings suggest that the language system itself is a source of implicit biases above and beyond previously known biases, such as those measured by the Implicit Association Test. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 856 KW - language KW - psycholinguistics KW - event expectations KW - reference KW - implicit bias KW - open data KW - open materials Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-516154 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 2 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban A1 - Poppels, Till A1 - Levy, Roger P. T1 - Implicit gender bias in linguistic descriptions for expected events BT - the cases of the 2016 United States and 2017 United Kingdom elections JF - Psychological Science N2 - Gender stereotypes influence subjective beliefs about the world, and this is reflected in our use of language. But do gender biases in language transparently reflect subjective beliefs? Or is the process of translating thought to language itself biased? During the 2016 United States (N = 24,863) and 2017 United Kingdom (N = 2,609) electoral campaigns, we compared participants' beliefs about the gender of the next head of government with their use and interpretation of pronouns referring to the next head of government. In the United States, even when the female candidate was expected to win, she pronouns were rarely produced and induced substantial comprehension disruption. In the United Kingdom, where the incumbent female candidate was heavily favored, she pronouns were preferred in production but yielded no comprehension advantage. These and other findings suggest that the language system itself is a source of implicit biases above and beyond previously known biases, such as those measured by the Implicit Association Test. KW - language KW - psycholinguistics KW - event expectations KW - reference KW - implicit bias KW - open data KW - open materials Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619890619 SN - 0956-7976 SN - 1467-9280 VL - 31 IS - 2 SP - 115 EP - 128 PB - Sage CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Fritzsche, Tom A1 - Meß, Katharina A1 - Philipp, Mareike A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. T1 - Only the right noise? BT - Effects of phonetic and visual input variability on 14-month-olds' minimal pair word learning JF - Developmental Science N2 - Seminal work by Werker and colleagues (Stager & Werker [1997]Nature, 388, 381-382) has found that 14-month-old infants do not show evidence for learning minimal pairs in the habituation-switch paradigm. However, when multiple speakers produce the minimal pair in acoustically variable ways, infants' performance improves in comparison to a single speaker condition (Rost & McMurray [2009]Developmental Science, 12, 339-349). The current study further extends these results and assesses how different kinds of input variability affect 14-month-olds' minimal pair learning in the habituation-switch paradigm testing German learning infants. The first two experiments investigated word learning when the labels were spoken by a single speaker versus when the labels were spoken by multiple speakers. In the third experiment we studied whether non-acoustic variability, implemented by visual variability of the objects presented together with the labels, would also affect minimal pair learning. We found enhanced learning in the multiple speakers compared to the single speaker condition, confirming previous findings with English-learning infants. In contrast, visual variability of the presented objects did not support learning. These findings both confirm and better delimit the beneficial role of speech-specific variability in minimal pair learning. Finally, we review different proposals on the mechanisms via which variability confers benefits to learning and outline what may be likely principles that underlie this benefit. We highlight among these the multiplicity of acoustic cues signalling phonemic contrasts and the presence of relations among these cues. It is in these relations where we trace part of the source for the apparent paradoxical benefit of variability in learning. KW - acoustic variability KW - habituation-switch paradigm KW - infant word learning KW - minimal pairs KW - phonological development KW - visual variability Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12950 SN - 1363-755X SN - 1467-7687 VL - 23 IS - 5 SP - 1 EP - 16 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Oxford ER - TY - GEN A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Fritzsche, Tom A1 - Meß, Katharina A1 - Philipp, Mareike A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. T1 - Only the right noise? BT - Effects of phonetic and visual input variability on 14-month-olds' minimal pair word learning T2 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Seminal work by Werker and colleagues (Stager & Werker [1997]Nature, 388, 381-382) has found that 14-month-old infants do not show evidence for learning minimal pairs in the habituation-switch paradigm. However, when multiple speakers produce the minimal pair in acoustically variable ways, infants' performance improves in comparison to a single speaker condition (Rost & McMurray [2009]Developmental Science, 12, 339-349). The current study further extends these results and assesses how different kinds of input variability affect 14-month-olds' minimal pair learning in the habituation-switch paradigm testing German learning infants. The first two experiments investigated word learning when the labels were spoken by a single speaker versus when the labels were spoken by multiple speakers. In the third experiment we studied whether non-acoustic variability, implemented by visual variability of the objects presented together with the labels, would also affect minimal pair learning. We found enhanced learning in the multiple speakers compared to the single speaker condition, confirming previous findings with English-learning infants. In contrast, visual variability of the presented objects did not support learning. These findings both confirm and better delimit the beneficial role of speech-specific variability in minimal pair learning. Finally, we review different proposals on the mechanisms via which variability confers benefits to learning and outline what may be likely principles that underlie this benefit. We highlight among these the multiplicity of acoustic cues signalling phonemic contrasts and the presence of relations among these cues. It is in these relations where we trace part of the source for the apparent paradoxical benefit of variability in learning. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 868 KW - acoustic variability KW - habituation-switch paradigm KW - infant word learning KW - minimal pairs KW - phonological development KW - visual variability Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-516674 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 5 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gianelli, Claudia A1 - Kühne, Katharina A1 - Lo Presti, Sara A1 - Mencaraglia, Silvia A1 - Dalla Volta, Riccardo T1 - Action processing in the motor system BT - Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) evidence of shared mechanisms in the visual and linguistic modalities JF - Brain and cognition : a journal of experimental and clinical research N2 - In two experiments, we compared the dynamics of corticospinal excitability when processing visually or linguistically presented tool-oriented hand actions in native speakers and sequential bilinguals. In a third experiment we used the same procedure to test non-motor, low-level stimuli, i.e. scrambled images and pseudo-words. Stimuli were presented in sequence: pictures (tool + tool-oriented hand action or their scrambled counterpart) and words (tool noun + tool-action verb or pseudo-words). Experiment 1 presented German linguistic stimuli to native speakers, while Experiment 2 presented English stimuli to non-natives. Experiment 3 tested Italian native speakers. Single-pulse trascranial magnetic stimulation (spTMS) was applied to the left motor cortex at five different timings: baseline, 200 ms after tool/noun onset, 150, 350 and 500 ms after hand/verb onset with motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and abductor digiti minimi (ADM) muscles. We report strong similarities in the dynamics of corticospinal excitability across the visual and linguistic modalities. MEPs' suppression started as early as 150 ms and lasted for the duration of stimulus presentation (500 ms). Moreover, we show that this modulation is absent for stimuli with no motor content. Overall, our study supports the notion of a core, overarching system of action semantics shared by different modalities. KW - TMS KW - motor cortex KW - action observation KW - action language KW - motor KW - inhibition KW - motor-evoked potentials Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2019.105510 SN - 0278-2626 SN - 1090-2147 VL - 139 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Sotiropoulou, Stavroula A1 - Gibson, Mark A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. T1 - Global organization in Spanish onsets JF - Journal of phonetics N2 - This paper addresses the relation between syllable structure and inter-segmental temporal coordination. The data examined are Electromagnetic Articulometry recordings from six speakers of Central Peninsular Spanish (henceforth, Spanish), producing words beginning with the clusters /pl, bl, kl, gl, p(sic), k(sic), t(sic)/ as well as corresponding unclustered sonorant-initial words in three vowel contexts /a, e, o/. In our results, we find evidence for a global organization of the segments involved in these combinations. This is reflected in a number of ways: shortening of the prevocalic sonorant in the cluster-initial case compared to the unclustered case, reorganization of the relative timing of the internal CV subsequence (in a CCV) in the obstruent-lateral context, early vowel initiation, and a strong compensatory relation between the duration of the obstruent-to-lateral transition and the duration of the lateral. In other words, we find that the global organization presiding over the segments partaking in these tautosyllabic CCVs is pleiotropic, that is, simultaneously expressed over a set of different phonetic parameters rather than via a privileged metric such as c-center stability or any other such given single measure (employed in prior works). KW - syllables KW - inter-segmental coordination KW - Central Peninsular Spanish KW - obstruent-lateral clusters KW - obstruent-rhotic clusters Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2020.100995 SN - 0095-4470 VL - 82 PB - Elsevier CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Rösler, Frank T1 - Are words pre-activated probabilistically during sentence comprehension? BT - evidence from new data and a Bayesian random-effects meta-analysis using publicly available data JF - Neuropsychologia : an international journal in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience N2 - Several studies (e.g., Wicha et al., 2003b; DeLong et al., 2005) have shown that readers use information from the sentential context to predict nouns (or some of their features), and that predictability effects can be inferred from the EEG signal in determiners or adjectives appearing before the predicted noun. While these findings provide evidence for the pre-activation proposal, recent replication attempts together with inconsistencies in the results from the literature cast doubt on the robustness of this phenomenon. Our study presents the first attempt to use the effect of gender on predictability in German to study the pre-activation hypothesis, capitalizing on the fact that all German nouns have a gender and that their preceding determiners can show an unambiguous gender marking when the noun phrase has accusative case. Despite having a relatively large sample size (of 120 subjects), both our preregistered and exploratory analyses failed to yield conclusive evidence for or against an effect of pre-activation. The sign of the effect is, however, in the expected direction: the more unexpected the gender of the determiner, the larger the negativity. The recent, inconclusive replication attempts by Nieuwland et al. (2018) and others also show effects with signs in the expected direction. We conducted a Bayesian random-ef-fects meta-analysis using our data and the publicly available data from these recent replication attempts. Our meta-analysis shows a relatively clear but very small effect that is consistent with the pre-activation account and demonstrates a very important advantage of the Bayesian data analysis methodology: we can incrementally accumulate evidence to obtain increasingly precise estimates of the effect of interest. KW - ERP KW - pre-activation KW - predictions KW - grammatical gender KW - Bayesian meta-analysis Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107427 SN - 0028-3932 SN - 1873-3514 VL - 142 PB - Elsevier Science CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Reifegerste, Jana A1 - Jarvis, Rebecca A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Effects of chronological age on native and nonnative sentence processing BT - evidence from subject-verb agreement in German JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - While much attention has been devoted to the cognition of aging multilingual individuals, little is known about how age affects their grammatical processing. We assessed subject-verb number-agreement processing in sixty native (L1) and sixty non-native (L2) speakers of German (age: 18-84) using a binary-choice sentence-completion task, along with various individual-differences tests. Our results revealed differential effects of age on L1 and L2 speakers' accuracy and reaction times (RTs). L1 speakers' RTs increased with age, and they became more susceptible to attraction errors. In contrast, L2 speakers' RTs decreased, once age-related slowing was controlled for, and their overall accuracy increased. We interpret this as resulting from increased L2 exposure. Moreover, L2 speakers' accuracy/RT patterns were more strongly affected by cognitive variables (working memory, interference control) than L1 speakers'. Our findings show that as regards bilinguals' grammatical processing ability, aging is associated with both gains (in experience) and losses (in cognitive abilities). KW - sentence processing KW - subject-verb agreement KW - attraction errors KW - second-language processing KW - aging Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104083 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 111 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam [u.a.] ER -