TY  - GEN
A1  - Omane, Paul Okyere
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Acquiring Syntactic Variability: The Production of Wh-Questions in Children and Adults Speaking Akan
T2  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - This paper investigates the predictions of the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis by studying the acquisition of wh-questions in 4- and 5-year-old Akan-speaking children in an experimental approach using an elicited production and an elicited imitation task. Akan has two types of wh-question structures (wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions), which allows an investigation of children’s acquisition of these two question structures and their preferences for one or the other. Our results show that adults prefer to use wh-ex-situ questions over wh-in-situ questions. The results from the children show that both age groups have the two question structures in their linguistic repertoire. However, they differ in their preferences in usage in the elicited production task: while the 5-year-olds preferred the wh-in-situ structure over the wh-ex-situ structure, the 4-year-olds showed a selective preference for the wh-in-situ structure in who-questions. These findings suggest a developmental change in wh-question preferences in Akan-learning children between 4 and 5 years of age with a so far unobserved u-shaped developmental pattern. In the elicited imitation task, all groups showed a strong tendency to maintain the structure of in-situ and ex-situ questions in repeating grammatical questions. When repairing ungrammatical ex-situ questions, structural changes to grammatical in-situ questions were hardly observed but the insertion of missing morphemes while keeping the ex-situ structure. Together, our findings provide only partial support for the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 738 
KW  - Akan
KW  - wh-questions
KW  - wh-in-situ
KW  - wh-ex-situ
KW  - derivational complexity
KW  - language acquisition
Y1  - 2022
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-536867
SN  - 1866-8364
SP  - 1
EP  - 15
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Arslan, Seçkin
A1  - Gür, Eren
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Predicting the sources of impaired wh-question comprehension in non-fluent aphasia
BT  - a cross-linguistic machine learning study on Turkish and German
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - This study investigates the comprehension of wh-questions in individuals with aphasia (IWA) speaking Turkish, a non-wh-movement language, and German, a wh-movement language. We examined six German-speaking and 11 Turkish-speaking IWA using picture-pointing tasks. Findings from our experiments show that the Turkish IWA responded more accurately to both object who and object which questions than to subject questions, while the German IWA performed better for subject which questions than in all other conditions. Using random forest models, a machine learning technique used in tree-structured classification, on the individual data revealed that both the Turkish and German IWA’s response accuracy is largely predicted by the presence of overt and unambiguous case marking. We discuss our results with regard to different theoretical approaches to the comprehension of wh-questions in aphasia.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 464 
KW  - Non-fluent aphasia
KW  - random forest algorithm
KW  - sentence comprehension
KW  - wh-in-situ
KW  - wh-questions
KW  - wh-movement
Y1  - 2018
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-412717
IS  - 464
ER  -