TY - JOUR A1 - Felser, Claudia A1 - Patterson, Clare A1 - Cunnings, Ian T1 - Structural constraints on pronoun binding and coreference: Evidence from eye movements during reading JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - A number of recent studies have investigated how syntactic and non-syntactic constraints combine to cue memory retrieval during anaphora resolution. In this paper we investigate how syntactic constraints and gender congruence interact to guide memory retrieval during the resolution of subject pronouns. Subject pronouns are always technically ambiguous, and the application of syntactic constraints on their interpretation depends on properties of the antecedent that is to be retrieved. While pronouns can freely corefer with non-quantified referential antecedents, linking a pronoun to a quantified antecedent is only possible in certain syntactic configurations via variable binding. We report the results from a judgment task and three online reading comprehension experiments investigating pronoun resolution with quantified and non-quantified antecedents. Results from both the judgment task and participants' eye movements during reading indicate that comprehenders freely allow pronouns to corefer with non-quantified antecedents, but that retrieval of quantified antecedents is restricted to specific syntactic environments. We interpret our findings as indicating that syntactic constraints constitute highly weighted cues to memory retrieval during anaphora resolution. KW - pronoun resolution KW - memory retrieval KW - quantification KW - eye movements KW - reading KW - English Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00840 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 IS - 840 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Nakano, Yoko A1 - Ikemoto, Yu A1 - Jacob, Gunnar A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - How Orthography Modulates Morphological Priming BT - 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 - Felser, Claudia A1 - Drummer, Janna-Deborah T1 - Sensitivity to Crossover Constraints During Native and Non-native Pronoun Resolution JF - Journal of psycholinguistic research N2 - We report the results from two experiments examining native and non-native German speakers’ sensitivity to crossover constraints on pronoun resolution. Our critical stimuli sentences contained personal pronouns in either strong (SCO) or weak crossover (WCO) configurations. Using eye-movement monitoring during reading and a gender-mismatch paradigm, Experiment 1 investigated whether a fronted wh-phrase would be considered as a potential antecedent for a pronoun intervening between the wh-phrase and its canonical position. Both native and non-native readers initially attempted coreference in WCO but not in SCO configurations, as evidenced by early gender-mismatch effects in our WCO conditions. Experiment 2 was an offline antecedent judgement task whose results mirrored the SCO/WCO asymmetry observed in our reading-time data. Taken together, our results show that the SCO constraint immediately restricts pronoun interpretation in both native and non-native comprehension, and further suggest that SCO and WCO constraints derive from different sources. KW - Strong crossover KW - Weak crossover KW - Pronoun resolution KW - Eye-movement monitoring KW - German Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-016-9465-8 SN - 0090-6905 SN - 1573-6555 VL - 46 SP - 771 EP - 789 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR 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 JF - Cognitive neuropsychology 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. KW - Non-fluent aphasia KW - random forest algorithm KW - sentence comprehension KW - wh-in-situ KW - wh-questions KW - wh-movement Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2017.1394284 SN - 0264-3294 SN - 1464-0627 VL - 34 SP - 312 EP - 331 PB - Taylor & Francis CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Reifegerste, Jana A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Effects of Aging on Interference During Pronoun Resolution JF - Journal of speech, language, and hearing research N2 - Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of healthy aging on the ability to suppress grammatically illicit antecedents during pronoun resolution. Method: In 2 reading-based acceptability-judgment experiments, younger and older speakers of German read sentences containing an object pronoun and 2 potential antecedent noun phrases, only 1 of which was a grammatically licit antecedent. Using a gender-mismatch paradigm, we compared to what extent younger and older speakers were sensitive to feature (mis)matches between the pronoun and either of the 2 antecedents. All participants were fluent readers of German and had finished at least secondary education. Results: Experiment 1 used a self-paced reading paradigm. Older speakers showed greater sensitivity than younger ones to mismatching licit antecedents, but no group showed any evidence of interference from an intervening competitor antecedent. In Experiment 2, we increased the processing demand by using paced word-by-word stimulus presentation and longer sentences. Here, older participants showed reduced sensitivity, in comparison with younger people, to mismatching licit antecedents. Unlike our younger participants, they showed signs of distraction by the presence of a linearly closer but grammatically inappropriate antecedent when no appropriate antecedent was available. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1044/2017_JSLHR-L-17-0183 SN - 1092-4388 SN - 1558-9102 VL - 60 SP - 3573 EP - 3589 PB - American Speech-Language-Hearing Assoc. CY - Rockville ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Reifegerste, Jana A1 - Hauer, Franziska A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Agreement processing and attraction errors in aging BT - evidence from subject-verb agreement in German JF - Aging, neuropsychology, and cognition : a journal on normal and dysfunctional development N2 - Effects of aging on lexical processing are well attested, but the picture is less clear for grammatical processing. Where age differences emerge, these are usually ascribed to working-memory (WM) decline. Previous studies on the influence of WM on agreement computation have yielded inconclusive results, and work on aging and subject-verb agreement processing is lacking. In two experiments (Experiment 1: timed grammaticality judgment, Experiment 2: self-paced reading + WM test), we investigated older (OA) and younger (YA) adults’ susceptibility to agreement attraction errors. We found longer reading latencies and judgment reaction times (RTs) for OAs. Further, OAs, particularly those with low WM scores, were more accepting of sentences with attraction errors than YAs. OAs showed longer reading latencies for ungrammatical sentences, again modulated by WM, than YAs. Our results indicate that OAs have greater difficulty blocking intervening nouns from interfering with the computation of agreement dependencies. WM can modulate this effect. KW - Subject-verb agreement KW - attraction errors KW - aging KW - grammaticality judgment KW - self-paced reading Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13825585.2016.1251550 SN - 1382-5585 SN - 1744-4128 VL - 24 IS - 6 SP - 672 EP - 702 PB - Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boxell, Oliver A1 - Felser, Claudia A1 - Cunnings, Ian T1 - Antecedent contained deletions in native and non-native sentence processing JF - Linguistic approaches to bilingualism N2 - We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring study investigating native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers’ real-time processing of antecedent-contained deletion (ACD), a type of verb phrase ellipsis in which the ellipsis gap forms part of its own antecedent. The resulting interpretation problem is traditionally thought to be solved by quantifier raising, a covert scope-shifting operation that serves to remove the gap from within its antecedent. Our L2 group comprised advanced, native German-speaking L2 learners of English. The analysis of the eye-movement data showed that both L1 and L2 English speakers tried to recover the missing verb phrase after encountering the gap. Only the native speakers showed evidence of ellipsis resolution being affected by quantification, however. No effects of quantification following gap detection were found in the L2 group, by contrast, indicating that recovery of the elided material was accomplished independently from the object’s quantificational status in this group. KW - L2 processing KW - eye-movement monitoring KW - antecedent contained deletion Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15006.box SN - 1879-9264 SN - 1879-9272 VL - 7 IS - 5 SP - 554 EP - 582 PB - John Benjamins Publishing Co. CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Reifegerste, Jana A1 - Meyer, Antje A1 - Zwitserlood, Pienie T1 - Inflectional complexity and experience affect plural processing in younger and older readers of Dutch and German JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience N2 - According to dual-route models of morphological processing, regular inflections can be retrieved as whole-word forms or decomposed into morphemes. Baayen, Dijkstra, and Schreuder [(1997). Singulars and plurals in Dutch: Evidence for a parallel dual-route model. Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 94–117. doi:10.1006/jmla.1997.2509] proposed a dual-route model in which singular-dominant plurals (“brides”) are decomposed, while plural-dominant plurals (“peas”) are accessed as whole-word units. We report two lexical-decision experiments investigating how plural processing is influenced by participants’ age and morphological complexity of the language (German/Dutch). For all Dutch participants and older German participants, we replicated the interaction between number and dominance reported by Baayen and colleagues. Younger German participants showed a main effect of number, indicating decomposition of all plurals. Access to stored forms seems to depend on morphological richness and experience with word forms. The data pattern fits neither full-decomposition nor full-storage models, but is compatible with dual-route models. KW - Morphological processing KW - morphological complexity KW - ageing KW - lexical decision KW - plural processing Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2016.1247213 SN - 2327-3798 SN - 2327-3801 VL - 32 IS - 4 SP - 471 EP - 487 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boxell, Oliver A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Sensitivity to parasitic gaps inside subject islands in native and non-native sentence processing JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition. KW - Parasitic gaps KW - island constraints KW - bilingual sentence processing KW - eye-movement monitoring KW - English Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728915000942 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 20 SP - 494 EP - 511 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Mosca, Michela T1 - Trilinguals’ language switching BT - A strategic and flexible account JF - The quarterly journal of experimental psychology N2 - The goal of this study was to determine how trilinguals select the language they intend to use in a language switching context. Two accounts are examined: (a) a language-specific account, according to which language selection considers the activation level of words of the intended language only (i.e., language co-activation without language competition), and (b) a language non-specific account, where activated words from both the intended and non-intended languages compete for selection (i.e., language co-activation with language competition). Results showed that, in both groups, all three languages competed for selection and that selection was achieved by inhibiting the currently non-relevant languages. Moreover, extending findings from previous research, the study reveals that, in both Experiments 1 and 2, the amount of inhibition was influenced not only by language proficiency but also by the typological similarity between languages. Overall, the study shows that language switching performance can be accounted for by a strategic and flexible inhibitory account. In particular, the controlling system is “strategic” in the sense that it aims at preventing potential conflicting situations, such as typological closeness between languages, and it is “flexible” in that it adjusts languages’ activation levels, depending on the conflict to be solved. KW - Language switching KW - language selection KW - trilingualism KW - inhibition KW - language typology Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021818763537 SN - 1747-0218 SN - 1747-0226 VL - 72 IS - 4 SP - 693 EP - 716 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER -