TY - JOUR A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Namyst, Anna A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Lau, Ellen T1 - Antecedent access mechanisms in pronoun processing BT - evidence from the N400 JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience N2 - Previous cross-modal priming studies showed that lexical decisions to words after a pronoun were facilitated when these words were semantically related to the pronoun's antecedent. These studies suggested that semantic priming effectively measured antecedent retrieval during coreference. We examined whether these effects extended to implicit reading comprehension using the N400 response. The results of three experiments did not yield strong evidence of semantic facilitation due to coreference. Further, the comparison with two additional experiments showed that N400 facilitation effects were reduced in sentences (vs. word pair paradigms) and were modulated by the case morphology of the prime word. We propose that priming effects in cross-modal experiments may have resulted from task-related strategies. More generally, the impact of sentence context and morphological information on priming effects suggests that they may depend on the extent to which the upcoming input is predicted, rather than automatic spreading activation between semantically related words. KW - Coreference KW - semantic priming KW - event-related potentials KW - sentence comprehension KW - N400 Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1566561 SN - 2327-3798 SN - 2327-3801 VL - 34 IS - 5 SP - 641 EP - 661 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - GEN A1 - Garcia, Rowena A1 - Roeser, Jens A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Children's online use of word order and morphosyntactic markers in Tagalog thematic role assignment BT - an eye-tracking study T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - We investigated whether Tagalog-speaking children incrementally interpret the first noun as the agent, even if verbal and nominal markers for assigning thematic roles are given early in Tagalog sentences. We asked five- and seven-year-old children and adult controls to select which of two pictures of reversible actions matched the sentence they heard, while their looks to the pictures were tracked. Accuracy and eye-tracking data showed that agent-initial sentences were easier to comprehend than patient-initial sentences, but the effect of word order was modulated by voice. Moreover, our eye-tracking data provided evidence that, by the first noun phrase, seven-year-old children looked more to the target in the agent-initial compared to the patient-initial conditions, but this word order advantage was no longer observed by the second noun phrase. The findings support language processing and acquisition models which emphasize the role of frequency in developing heuristic strategies (e.g., Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006). T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 673 KW - Tagalog acquisition KW - sentence comprehension KW - word order KW - morphosyntax KW - thematic role assignment Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-469678 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 673 SP - 533 EP - 555 ER - TY - THES A1 - Burmester, Juliane T1 - Linguistic and visual salience in sentence comprehension T1 - Linguistische und visuelle Salienz im Satzverständnis BT - evidence from behavioural and electrophysiological studies BT - Evidenz aus behavioralen and elektrophysiologischen Studien N2 - Interlocutors typically link their utterances to the discourse environment and enrich communication by linguistic (e.g., information packaging) and extra-linguistic (e.g., eye gaze, gestures) means to optimize information transfer. Psycholinguistic studies underline that ‒for meaning computation‒ listeners profit from linguistic and visual cues that draw their focus of attention to salient information. This dissertation is the first work that examines how linguistic compared to visual salience cues influence sentence comprehension using the very same experimental paradigms and materials, that is, German subject-before-object (SO) and object-before-subject (OS) sentences, across the two cue modalities. Linguistic salience was induced by indicating a referent as the aboutness topic. Visual salience was induced by implicit (i.e., unconscious) or explicit (i.e., shared) manipulations of listeners’ attention to a depicted referent. In Study 1, a selective, facilitative impact of linguistic salience on the context-sensitive OS word order was found using offline comprehensibility judgments. More precisely, during online sentence processing, this impact was characterized by a reduced sentence-initial Late positivity which reflects reduced processing costs for updating the current mental representation of discourse. This facilitative impact of linguistic salience was not replicated by means of an implicit visual cue (Study 2) shown to modulate word order preferences during sentence production. However, a gaze shift to a depicted referent as an indicator of shared attention eased sentence-initial processing similar to linguistic salience as revealed by reduced reading times (Study 3). Yet, this cue did not modulate the strong subject-antecedent preference during later pronoun resolution like linguistic salience. Taken together, these findings suggest a significant impact of linguistic and visual salience cues on sentence comprehension, which substantiates that both the information delivered via language and via the visual environment is integrated into the mental representation of the discourse; but, the way how salience is induced is crucial to its impact. N2 - In der alltäglichen Kommunikation optimieren Gesprächspartner den Informationstransfer typischerweise durch linguistische und extra-linguistische, visuelle Hinweise (z.B. Blickbewegungen, Zeigegesten), mittels derer sie ihre Äußerungen mit dem Diskursumfeld verknüpfen. Psycholinguistische Studien unterstreichen, dass Zuhörer für das Verstehen von Sätzen sowohl von linguistischen als auch visuellen Hinweisreizen profitieren, die ihre Aufmerksamkeit auf saliente Informationen lenken. Ziel dieser Dissertation ist es, zu charakterisieren, ob und inwiefern visuelle im Vergleich zu linguistischer Salienz das Satzverständnis beeinflusst. Linguistische Salienz wurde durch das Einführen eines Referenten, als sog. Topik, induziert. Visuelle Salienz wurde durch implizite (unbewusste) oder explizite (bewusste) Manipulationen der Aufmerksamkeit von erwachsenen StudienteilnehmerInnen auf einen visuell abgebildeten Referenten hervorgerufen. Im Fokus der drei Studien dieser Dissertation steht die Untersuchung des Einflusses von linguistischer und visueller Salienz auf die satzinitiale Verarbeitung von kanonischen Subjekt-Verb-Objekt (SO)- und nicht-kanonischen Objekt-Verb-Subjekt (OS)-Sätzen im Deutschen, wobei in beiden Modalitäten dieselben experimentellen Paradigmen verwendet werden. Studie 1 liefert Evidenz für einen selektiven, erleichternden Einfluss von zuvor induzierter linguistischer Salienz auf das Verstehen von OS-Sätzen. Dieser Einfluss linguistischer Salienz zeigte sich sowohl nach der Präsentation der Zielsätze, nämlich anhand behavioraler Daten zur Beurteilung des Verständnisses, als auch während des Lesens von OS-Sätzen, nämlich in Form einer satzinitialen, reduzierten späten Positivierung (sog. Late Positivity) in den ereigniskorrelierten Potentialen der elektrophysiologischen Messung. Dieser erleichternde Einfluss der linguistischen Salienz wurde nicht durch die implizite, visuelle Manipulation der Aufmerksamkeit der StudienteilnehmerInnen auf einen visuell abgebildeten Referenten repliziert (Studie 2). In Studie 3 weist die explizite, intentionale Manipulation der Aufmerksamkeit der StudienteilnehmerInnen mittels der Blickbewegung einer (virtuellen) Person auf einen visuell abgebildeten Referenten jedoch auf eine satzinitiale Verarbeitungserleichterung in Form verkürzter Lesezeiten von SO- und OS-Sätzen hin. Dieser Effekt visueller Salienz ähnelte zwar dem Einfluss linguistischer Salienz während des satzinitialen Lesens, unterschied sich jedoch von dieser während der anschließenden Pronomeninterpretation. Zusammengefasst liefern die Ergebnisse dieser Dissertation Evidenz für einen signifikanten Einfluss linguistischer und visueller Salienz auf das Satzverständnis, wobei die kontextuelle Einbettung von Salienzmerkmalen eine entscheidende Rolle für die Integration von Information in die mentale Diskursrepräsentation spielt. KW - sentence processing KW - sentence comprehension KW - linguistic salience KW - visual salience KW - aboutness topic KW - German word order KW - information structure KW - discourse context KW - mental representation KW - Satzverarbeitung KW - Satzverständnis KW - linguistische Salienz KW - visuelle Salienz KW - Topik KW - Wortstellung im Deutschen KW - Informationsstruktur KW - Diskurskontext KW - mentale Repräsentation Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-443155 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Namyst, Anna A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Lau, Ellen T1 - Antecedent access mechanisms in pronoun processing BT - evidence from the N400 T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Previous cross-modal priming studies showed that lexical decisions to words after a pronoun were facilitated when these words were semantically related to the pronoun’s antecedent. These studies suggested that semantic priming effectively measured antecedent retrieval during coreference. We examined whether these effects extended to implicit reading comprehension using the N400 response. The results of three experiments did not yield strong evidence of semantic facilitation due to coreference. Further, the comparison with two additional experiments showed that N400 facilitation effects were reduced in sentences (vs. word pair paradigms) and were modulated by the case morphology of the prime word. We propose that priming effects in cross-modal experiments may have resulted from task-related strategies. More generally, the impact of sentence context and morphological information on priming effects suggests that they may depend on the extent to which the upcoming input is predicted, rather than automatic spreading activation between semantically related words. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 568 KW - coreference KW - semantic priming KW - event-related potentials KW - sentence comprehension KW - N400 Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-433237 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 568 SP - 641 EP - 661 ER -