TY - JOUR A1 - Böhning, Marita A1 - Starke, Franziska A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - Fast Mapping in Williams syndrome : a single case study Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Sprachwahrnehmung und Spracherwerb im ersten Lebensjahr Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Carroll, Susanne E. T1 - Segmentation : Learning how to 'hear words' in the L2 speech stream N2 - We 'hear words' when we can segment prosodic units from the speech stream and activate associated lexical entries. Segmentation is sometimes regarded in SLA as a perceptual problem, not a grammatical one. I argue here that this view is wrong: segmenting formatives results when we construct prosodic units on the basis of phonetic cues to their edges. The learner's first task is to acquire the relevant cues to these edges. The problem of segmentation is discussed within the framework provided by the Autonomous Induction Theory Y1 - 2004 SN - 0079-1636 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Domahs, Frank A1 - Lochy, A. A1 - Eibl, G. A1 - Delazer, M. T1 - Adding colour to multiplication: Rehabilitation of arithmetic fact retrieval in a case of traumatic brain injury N2 - This study describes ME, a patient in the chronic stage after a traumatic brain injury. During an extensive training programme ME tried to regain automaticity in the retrieval of simple multiplication facts. He succeeded in substantially decreasing response latencies in multiplication, reducing the handicap at his job. This improvement generalised to a non-trained operand order, to non-trained problems, and to a non-trained output modality. Moreover, these effects were maintained over at least four months. Interestingly, however, ME's training effects were operation specific: No significant improvement occurred in addition, subtraction, or division. As coloured presentation of multiplication problems proved to be a valuable cue in facilitating the patient's performance, this might turn out to be a useful tool in the rehabilitation of fact retrieval in general Y1 - 2004 SN - 0960-2011 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Beim Graben, Peter A1 - Saddy, Douglas A1 - Kurths, Jürgen T1 - Untitled Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jaeger, Gerhard T1 - Alternatives or presuppositions? a comparison of the background presupposition rule with alternative semantics Y1 - 2004 SN - 0301-4428 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Frisch, Stefan A1 - Beim Graben, Peter A1 - Schlesewsky, Matthias T1 - Parallelizing grammatical functions : P600 and P345 reflect different cost of reanalysis N2 - It is well-known from psycholinguistic literature that the human language processing system exhibits preferences when sentence constituents are ambiguous with respect to their grammatical function. Generally, many theories assume that an interpretation towards the subject is preferred in such cases. Later disambiguations which contradict such a preference induce enhanced processing difficulty (i.e. reanalysis) which reflects itself in late positive deflections (P345/P600) in event-related brain potentials (ERPs). In the case of phoric elements such as pronouns, a second strategy is known according to which an ambiguous pronoun preferentially receives the grammatical function that its antecedent has (parallel function strategy). In an ERP study, we show that this strategy can in principle override the general subject preference strategy (known for both pronominal and nonpronominal constituents) and induce an object preference, in case that the pronoun's antecedent is itself an object. Interestingly, the revision of a subject preference leads to a P600 component, whereas the revision of an object preference induces an earlier positivity (P345). In order to show that the latter component is indeed a positivity and not an N400-like negativity in the same time range, we apply an additional analysis based on symbolic dynamics which allows to determine the polarity of an ERP effect on purely methodological grounds. With respect to the two positivities, we argue that the latency differences reflect qualitative differences in the reanalysis processes Y1 - 2004 SN - 0218-1274 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Frisch, Stefan A1 - Hahne, A. A1 - Friederici, A. D. T1 - Word category and verb-argument structure information in the dynamics of parsing N2 - One of the core issues in psycholinguistic research concerns the relationship between word category information and verb-argument structure (e.g. transitivity) information of verbs in the process of sentence parsing. In two experiments (visual versus auditory presentation) using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we addressed this question by presenting sentences in which the critical word simultaneously realized both a word category and a transitivity violation. ERPs for sentences with both types of violation clustered with the patterns for sentences with a word category violation only, but were different from the patterns elicited by argument structure violations in isolation, since only the latter elicited an N400 ERP component. The finding that an argument structure violation evoked an N400 only if the phrase structure of the respective sentence was correct suggests that a successful integration of the word category information of a verb functionally precedes the application of its argument structure information. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved Y1 - 2004 SN - 0010-0277 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Beim Graben, Peter A1 - Jurish, B. A1 - Saddy, Douglas A1 - Frisch, Stefan T1 - Language processing by dynamical systems N2 - We describe a part of the stimulus sentences of a German language processing ERP experiment using a context- free grammar and represent different processing preferences by its unambiguous partitions. The processing is modeled by deterministic pushdown automata. Using a theorem proven by Moore, we map these automata onto discrete time dynamical systems acting at the unit square, where the processing preferences are represented by a control parameter. The actual states of the automata are rectangles lying in the unit square that can be interpreted as cylinder sets in the context of symbolic dynamics theory. We show that applying a wrong processing preference to a certain input string leads to an unwanted invariant set in the parsers dynamics. Then, syntactic reanalysis and repair can be modeled by a switching of the control parameter - in analogy to phase transitions observed in brain dynamics. We argue that ERP components are indicators of these bifurcations and propose an ERP-like measure of the parsing model Y1 - 2004 SN - 0218-1274 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Beim Graben, Peter A1 - Frisch, Stefan T1 - Is it positive or negative? On determining ERP components N2 - In most experiments using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), there is a straightforward way to define-on theoretical grounds-which of the conditions tested is the experimental condition and which is the control condition. It, however, theoretical assumptions do not give sufficient and unambiguous information to decide this question, then the interpretation of an ERP effect becomes difficult, especially if one takes into account that certain effects can be both a positivity or a negativity on the basis of the morphology of the pattern as well as with respect to peak latency (regard for example, N400 and P345). Exemplified with an ERP experiment on language processing, we present such a critical case and offer a possible solution on the basis of nonlinear data analysis. We show that a generalized polarity histogram, the word statistics of symbolic dynamics, is in principle able to distinguish negative going ERP components from positive ones when an appropriate encoding strategy, the half wave encoding is employed. We propose statistical criteria which allow to determine ERP components on purely methodological grounds Y1 - 2004 SN - 0018-9294 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Kiefer, D. A1 - Schulz, A. A1 - Weissenborn, E. A1 - Schmitz, M. T1 - Functional elements in infants' speech processing : the role of determiners in syntactic categorization of lexical elements N2 - How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words. Evidence from the head-turn preference paradigm shows that, although 12- to 13-month-olds cannot do this, 14- to 16- month-olds are able to use a determiner to categorize a following novel word as a noun. In contrast, no categorization effect was found for a novel word following a subject pronoun. To understand this difference we analyzed adult child- directed speech. This analysis showed that there are in fact stronger co-occurrence relations between determiners and nouns than between subject pronouns and verbs. Thus, in German determiners may be more reliable Cues to the syntactic category of an adjacent novel word than are subject pronouns. We propose that the capacity to syntactically categorize novel words, demonstrated here for the first time in children this young, mediates between the recognition of the specific morphosyntactic frame in which a novel word appears and the word-to-world mapping that is needed to build up a semantic representation for the novel word Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - Swoboda-Moll, Maria A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Tense and agreement in clausal representations : Evidence from German agrammatic aphasia Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Sprachwahrnehmung und Spracherwerb im ersten Lebensjahr Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Saddy, Douglas A1 - Drenhaus, Heiner A1 - Frisch, Stefan T1 - Processing polarity items : Contrastive licensing costs N2 - We describe an experiment that investigated the failure to license polarity items in German using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The results reveal distinct processing reflexes associated with failure to license positive polarity items in comparison to failure to license negative polarity items. Failure to license both negative and positive polarity items elicited an N400 component reflecting semantic integration cost. Failure to license positive polarity items, however, also elicited a P600 component. The additional P600 in the positive polarity violations may reflect higher processing complexity associated with a negative operator. This difference between the two types of violation suggests that the processing of negative and positive polarity items does not involve identical mechanisms. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved Y1 - 2004 SN - 0093-934X ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Saddy, Douglas A1 - Uriagereka, J. T1 - Measuring language N2 - The study of language, its processing and its bearing on human cortical processes are all extensive domains of investigation in their own right. In this overview tutorial we limit ourselves to a sample of core illustrative issues. Our central aim is to demonstrate how complexity within the language faculty arises from two a priori distinct sources: the computational complexity inherent in the grammar of the language system itself and the procedural complexity resulting from marshalling processing resources in order to produce or interpret utterances that correspond to the grammar. Distinguishing between these two sources of complexity is a current goal in investigations of the human language faculty. The combination of quantitative approaches with newer qualitative approaches to the analysis of electro-cortical behaviour associated with carefully controlled language paradigms represents a new approach to clarifying this central issue Y1 - 2004 SN - 0218-1274 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stede, Manfred T1 - Does discourse processing need discourse topics? Y1 - 2004 SN - 0301-4428 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Féry, Caroline T1 - German accent revisited Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fanselow, Gisbert T1 - Cyclic Phonology Syntax-Interaction : Movement to First Position in German Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fanselow, Gisbert T1 - The MLC and Interface Economy Y1 - 2004 SN - 3-11-017961-X ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fanselow, Gisbert T1 - Fakten, Fakten, Fakten! Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Heekeren, Hauke R. A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - Heinemann, Steffi A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Villringer, Arno T1 - Neural correlates of syntactic transformations N2 - Many agrammatic aphasics have a specific syntactic comprehension deficit involving processing syntactic transformations. It has been proposed that this deficit is due to a dysfunction of Broca's area, an area that is thought to be critical for comprehension of complex transformed sentences. The goal of this study was to investigate the role of Broca's area in processing canonical and non-canonical sentences in healthy subjects. The sentences were presented auditorily and were controlled for task difficulty. Subjects were asked to judge the grammaticality of the sentences while their brain activity was monitored using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. Processing both kinds of sentences resulted in activation of language-related brain regions. Comparison of non-canonical and canonical sentences showed greater activation in bilateral temporal regions; a greater activation of Broca's area in processing antecedent-gap relations was not found. Moreover, the posterior part of Broca's area was conjointly activated by both sentence conditions. Broca's area is thus involved in general syntactic processing as required by grammaticality judgments and does not seem to have a specific role in processing syntactic transformations. (C) 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc Y1 - 2004 UR - http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/38751/home SN - 1065-9471 ER -