TY - CHAP A1 - Prieto, Julio T1 - Distancias cortas: microrrelato y derivas genercas en Marosa di Giorgio T2 - MicroBerlín - de minificciones y microrrelatos Y1 - 2015 SN - 978-84-8489-929-7 SP - 235 EP - 247 PB - Iberoamericana CY - Madrid ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ette, Ottmar T1 - Nanofilologia y teoria literaria T2 - MicroBerlín - de minificciones y microrrelatos Y1 - 2015 SN - 978-84-8489-929-7 SP - 51 EP - 84 PB - Iberoamericana CY - Madrid ER - TY - BOOK ED - Ette, Ottmar ED - Ingenschay, Dieter ED - Schmidt-Welle, Friedhelm ED - Valls, Fernando T1 - MicroBerlín - de minificciones y microrrelatos T3 - Bibliotheca Ibero-Americana ; 161 N2 - Este volumen se ha propuesto incluir no solamente los debates teóricos y metodológicos con respecto a la posible definición del microrrelato como "cuarto género" y los diversos análisis sobre el desarrollo y la historia del mismo, sino también relacionar la minificción literaria con otras prácticas simbólicas (como las minificciones cinematográficas, etc.), y considerar las nuevas posibilidades de difusión de la minificción en los medios masivos de comunicación y, sobre todo, en las redes sociales (Facebook, Twitter) y en el Internet en general. En los cuatro apartados del volumen, sus autores se ocupan de la teoría del género y la historia del micorrelato literario; analizan la intertextualidad del nuevo género; interpretan una serie de minificciones literarias de autoras y autores hispanoamericanos y españoles; y consideran otras formas de lo micromediático, los litblogs, la producción de microrrelatos en las redes sociales, y las minificciones cinematográficas. Y1 - 2015 SN - 978-84-8489-929-7 PB - Iberoamericana CY - Madrid ER - TY - THES A1 - Heyer, Vera T1 - Native and non-native processing of derived forms BT - Masked Priming Evidence from English and German Y1 - 2015 ER - TY - INPR A1 - Abutalebi, Jubin A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Bilingualism, cognition, and aging T2 - Bilingualism : language and cognition. N2 - Extract: Topics in psycholinguistics and the neurocognition of language rarely attract the attention of journalists or the general public. One topic that has done so, however, is the potential benefits of bilingualism for general cognitive functioning and development, and as a precaution against cognitive decline in old age. Sensational claims have been made in the public domain, mostly by journalists and politicians. Recently (September 4, 2014) The Guardian reported that “learning a foreign language can increase the size of your brain”, and Michael Gove, the UK's previous Education Secretary, noted in an interview with The Guardian (September 30, 2011) that “learning languages makes you smarter”. The present issue of BLC addresses these topics by providing a state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and experimental research on the role of bilingualism for cognition in children and adults. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728914000741 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 18 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 2 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Sekerina, Irina A. A1 - Sauermann, Antje T1 - Visual attention and quantifier-spreading in heritage Russian bilinguals JF - Second language research N2 - It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier every and make quantifier-spreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking study tested bilingual heritage Russian-English adults and investigated how they interpret of sentences like Every alligator lies in a bathtub in both languages. Participants performed a sentence-picture verification task while their eye movements were recorded. Pictures showed three pairs of alligators in bathtubs and two extra objects: elephants (Control condition), bathtubs (Overexhaustive condition), or alligators (Underexhaustive condition). Monolingual adults performed at ceiling in all conditions. Heritage language (HL) adults made 20% q-spreading errors, but only in the Overexhaustive condition, and when they made an error they spent more time looking at the two extra bathtubs during the Verb region. We attribute q-spreading in HL speakers to cognitive overload caused by the necessity to integrate conflicting sources of information, i.e. the spoken sentences in their weaker, heritage, language and attention-demanding visual context, that differed with respect to referential salience. KW - eye-tracking KW - heritage language KW - quantifier-spreading KW - Russian KW - universal quantifiers KW - visual attention Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658314537292 SN - 0267-6583 SN - 1477-0326 VL - 31 IS - 1 SP - 75 EP - 104 PB - Sage Publ. CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gueldemann, Tom A1 - Zerbian, Sabine A1 - Zimmermann, Malte ED - Liberman, M ED - Partee, BH T1 - Variation in information structure with special reference to Africa JF - Annual review of linguistics JF - Annual Review of Linguistics N2 - Information structure has been one of the central topics of recent linguistic research. This review discusses a wide range of current approaches with particular reference to African languages, as these have been playing a crucial role in advancing our knowledge about the diversity of and recurring patterns in both meaning and form of information structural notions. We focus on cross-linguistic functional frameworks, the investigation of prosody, formal syntactic theories, and relevant effects of semantic interpretation. Information structure is a thriving research domain that promises to yield important advances in our general understanding of human language. KW - contrast KW - focus KW - formal syntax KW - prosody KW - theticity KW - topic KW - semantics KW - focus sensitivity Y1 - 2015 SN - 978-0-8243-4201-2 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-125134 SN - 2333-9691 VL - 1 SP - 155 EP - 178 PB - Annual Reviews CY - Palo Alto ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Demske, Ulrike T1 - Adverbial Clauses, Main Clause Phenomena, and the composition of the Left Periphery JF - Studies in language Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.39.1.09dem SN - 0378-4177 VL - 39 IS - 1 SP - 235 EP - 243 PB - Benjamins CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Clahsen, Harald A1 - Gerth, Sabrina A1 - Heyer, Vera A1 - Schott, Esther T1 - Morphology constrains native and non-native word formation in different ways Evidence from plurals inside compounds JF - The mental lexicon N2 - The role of morphological and syntactic information in non-native second language (L2) comprehension is controversial. Some have argued that late bilinguals rapidly integrate grammatical cues with other information sources during reading or listening in the same way as native speakers. Others claim that structural cues are underused in L2 processing. We examined different kinds of modifiers inside compounds (e.g. singulars vs. plurals, *rat eater vs. rats eater) with respect to this controversy which are subject to both structural and nonstructural constraints. Two offline and two online (eye-movement) experiments were performed examining the role of these constraints in spoken language comprehension of English and German, testing 77 advanced L2 learners. We also compared the L2 groups to corresponding groups of native speakers. Our results suggest that despite native-like sensitivity to the compounding constraints, late bilinguals rely more on non-structural constraints and are less able to revise their initial interpretations than L1 comprehenders. KW - morphological processing KW - compounding KW - visual world paradigm KW - eye movement KW - bilingualism KW - second language Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.10.1.03cla SN - 1871-1340 SN - 1871-1375 VL - 10 IS - 1 SP - 53 EP - 87 PB - Benjamins CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kügler, Frank T1 - Phonological phrasing and ATR vowel harmony in Akan JF - Phonology N2 - This paper examines phonological phrasing in the Kwa language Akan. Regressive [+ATR] vowel harmony between words (RVH) serves as a hitherto unreported diagnostic of phonological phrasing. In this paper I discuss VP-internal and NP-internal structures, as well as SVO(O) and serial verb constructions. RVH is a general process in Akan grammar, although it is blocked in certain contexts. The analysis of phonological phrasing relies on universal syntax-phonology mapping constraints whereby lexically headed syntactic phrases are mapped onto phonological phrases. Blocking contexts call for a domain-sensitive analysis of RVH assuming recursive prosodic structure which makes reference to maximal and non-maximal phonological phrases. It is proposed (i) that phonological phrase structure is isomorphic to syntactic structure in Akan, and (ii) that the process of RVH is blocked at the edge of a maximal phonological phrase; this is formulated in terms of a domain-sensitive CrispEdge constraint. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675715000081 SN - 0952-6757 SN - 1469-8188 VL - 32 IS - 1 SP - 177 EP - 204 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Marfo, Charles A1 - Yeboah, Philomena Abeka A1 - Bonku, Lucy T1 - Exploiting the exploiter: some violations of society's expectations in beyond the horizon and the housemaid JF - 3 L : language, linguistics, literature ; the Southeast Asian journal of English language studies N2 - This paper does a critical reading of Beyond the Horizon and The Housemaid and observes that the author, Amma Darko, seeks primarily to challenge prevailing and traditional views of motherhood held by African societies; i.e. motherhood and its associated activities such as caring, training and disciplining. Amma Darko sharply condemns this view and calls for a critical analysis of the nature of motherhood, especially in contemporary times. Agreeing with Amma Darko and taking issues raised by her even a little further, with snippets from the books, the paper brings to the fore the fact that the prevailing and traditional views of motherhood have inherent conflict with reality. That is to say, these views are carelessly assumed as problem-free. Within this context, we also critically bring into discussion the running theme of exploiting the exploiter in the two books within the framework of gender studies and queer theory. We also generally question the fixed categories of paradigms generated by normative ideology and conclude with the realisation that almost all mothers (and, for that matter, exhibition of womanhood) in these novels failed because of the wrong choices they made, which were basically and largely fuelled by challenging economic conditions. KW - culture KW - exploitation KW - gender KW - motherhood KW - traditional expectations Y1 - 2015 SN - 0128-5157 VL - 21 IS - 1 SP - 35 EP - 46 PB - School of Language Studies & Linguistics, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia CY - Bangi ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Simik, Radek A1 - Wierzba, Marta T1 - The role of givenness, presupposition, and prosody in Czech word order: An experimental study JF - Semantics and pragmatics KW - givenness KW - presupposition KW - prosody KW - Czech KW - scrambling KW - acceptability judgments KW - experiments Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.8.3 SN - 1937-8912 VL - 8 PB - Linguistic Society of America CY - Washington ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Roon, Kevin D. A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. T1 - Perceptuo-motor effects of response-distractor compatibility in speech: beyond phonemic identity JF - Psychonomic bulletin & review : a journal of the Psychonomic Society N2 - Previous studies have found faster response times in a production task when a speaker perceives a distractor syllable that is identical to the syllable they are required to produce. No study has found such effects when a response and a distractor are not identical but share parameters below the level of the phoneme. Results from Experiment 1 show some evidence of a response-time effect of response-distractor voicing congruency. Experiment 2 showed a robust effect of articulator congruency: perceiving a distractor that has the same articulatory organ as that implicated in the planned motor response speeds up response times. These results necessitate a more direct and specific formulation of the perception-production link than warranted by previous experimental evidence. Implications for theories of speech production are also discussed. KW - Speech perception KW - Speech production KW - Motor planning/programming KW - Psycholinguistics Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-014-0666-6 SN - 1069-9384 SN - 1531-5320 VL - 22 IS - 1 SP - 242 EP - 250 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Chen, Zhong A1 - Li, Qiang A1 - Lin, Chien-Jer Charles A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - The subject-relative advantage in Chinese: Evidence for expectation-based processing JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - Chinese relative clauses are an important test case for pitting the predictions of expectation-based accounts against those of memory-based theories. The memory-based accounts predict that object relatives are easier to process than subject relatives because, in object relatives, the distance between the relative clause verb and the head noun is shorter. By contrast, expectation-based accounts such as surprisal predict that the less frequent object relative should be harder to process. In previous studies on Chinese relative clause comprehension, local ambiguities may have rendered a comparison between relative clause types uninterpretable. We designed experimental materials in which no local ambiguities confound the comparison. We ran two experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) to compare reading difficulty in subject and object relatives which were placed either in subject or object modifying position. The evidence from our studies is consistent with the predictions of expectation-based accounts but not with those of memory-based theories. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. KW - Sentence processing KW - Relative clause KW - Structural expectation KW - Working-memory KW - Surprisal KW - Chinese Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2014.10.005 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 79 SP - 97 EP - 120 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Gattei, Carolina A1 - Sigman, Mariano A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold T1 - Working memory differences in long-distance dependency resolution JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - There is a wealth of evidence showing that increasing the distance between an argument and its head leads to more processing effort, namely, locality effects: these are usually associated with constraints in working memory (DLT: Gibson, 2000: activation-based model: Lewis and Vasishth, 2005). In SOV languages, however, the opposite effect has been found: antilocality (see discussion in Levy et al., 2013). Antilocality effects can be explained by the expectation based approach as proposed by Levy (2008) or by the activation-based model of sentence processing as proposed by Lewis and Vasishth (2005). We report an eye-tracking and a self-paced reading study with sentences in Spanish together with measures of individual differences to examine the distinction between expectation- and memory based accounts, and within memory-based accounts the further distinction between DLT and the activation-based model. The experiments show that (i) antilocality effects as predicted by the expectation account appear only for high-capacity readers; (ii) increasing dependency length by interposing material that modifies the head of the dependency (the verb) produces stronger facilitation than increasing dependency length with material that does not modify the head; this is in agreement with the activation-based model but not with the expectation account; and (iii) a possible outcome of memory load on low-capacity readers is the increase in regressive saccades (locality effects as predicted by memory-based accounts) or, surprisingly, a speedup in the self-paced reading task; the latter consistent with good-enough parsing (Ferreira et al., 2002). In sum, the study suggests that individual differences in working memory capacity play a role in dependency resolution, and that some of the aspects of dependency resolution can be best explained with the activation-based model together with a prediction component. KW - locality KW - antilocality KW - working memory capacity KW - individual differences KW - Spanish KW - activation KW - DLT KW - expectation Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00312 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Haßler, Gerda T1 - Evidentiality and the expression of speaker's stance in Romance languages and German JF - Discourse studies : an interdisciplinary journal for the study of text and talk N2 - In recent years, the category of evidentiality has also come into use for the description of Romance languages and of German. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. We consider evidentiality to be a structural dimension of grammar, the values of which are expressed by types of constructions that code the source of information which a speaker imparts. If we look at the situation in Romance languages and in German, drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality presents problems that are difficult to solve. Adding markers of the source of the speaker's knowledge often limits the degree of responsibility of the speaker for the content of the utterance. Evidential adverbs are a frequently used means of marking the source of the speaker's knowledge. The evidential meaning is generalised to marking any source of knowledge, what can be regarded as a result of a process of pragmaticalisation. The use of certain means which also carry out evidential markings can even contribute to the blurring of the different kinds of evidentiality. German also has modal verbs which in conjunction with the perfect tense of the verb have a predominantly evidential use (sollen and wollen). But even here the evidential marking is not without influence on the modality of the utterance. The Romance languages, however, do not have such specialised verbs for expressing evidentiality in certain contexts. To do this, they mark evidentiality - often context bound - by verb forms such as the conditional and the imperfect tense. This article shall contrast the different architectures used in expressing evidentiality in German and in the Romance languages. KW - Adverbs KW - evidentiality KW - modal verbs KW - modality KW - pragmaticalisation Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445614564522 SN - 1461-4456 SN - 1461-7080 VL - 17 IS - 2 SP - 182 EP - 209 PB - Sage Publ. CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Budd, Mary-Jane A1 - Paulmann, Silke A1 - Barry, Christopher A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Producing morphologically complex words: An ERP study with children and adults JF - Developmental cognitive neuroscience : a journal for cognitive, affective and social developmental neuroscience N2 - widely studied morphological phenomenon in psycholinguistic research is the plurals-inside-compounds effect in English, which is the avoidance of regular plural modifiers within compounds (e.g., *rats hunter). The current study employs event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the production of plurals-inside-compounds in children and adults. We specifically examined the ERP correlates of producing morphologically complex words in 8-year-olds, 12-year-olds and adults, by recording ERPs during the silent production of compounds with plural or singular modifiers. Results for both children and adults revealed a negativity in response to compounds produced from regular plural forms when compared to compounds formed from irregular plurals, indicating a highly specific brain response to a subtle linguistic contrast. Although children performed behaviourally with an adult-like pattern in the task, we found a broader distribution and a considerably later latency in children's brain potentials than in adults', indicating that even in late childhood the brain networks involved in language processing are subject to subtle developmental changes. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. KW - ERPs KW - Morphology KW - Linguistics KW - Language production Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2014.11.002 SN - 1878-9293 SN - 1878-9307 VL - 12 SP - 51 EP - 60 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hanne, Sandra A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Sentence comprehension and morphological cues in aphasia: What eye-tracking reveals about integration and prediction JF - Journal of neurolinguistics : an international journal for the study of brain function in language behavior and experience N2 - Comprehension of non-canonical sentences can be difficult for individuals with aphasia (IWA). It is still unclear to which extent morphological cues like case marking or verb inflection may influence IWA's performance or even help to override deficits in sentence comprehension. Until now, studies have mainly used offline methods to draw inferences about syntactic deficits and, so far, only a few studies have looked at online syntactic processing in aphasia. We investigated sentence processing in German-speaking IWA by combining an offline (sentence-picture matching) and an online (eye-tracking in the visual-world paradigm) method. Our goal was to determine whether IWA are capable of using inflectional morphology (number-agreement markers on verbs and case markers in noun phrases) as a cue to sentence interpretation. We report results of two visual-world experiments using German reversible SVO and OVS sentences. In each study, there were eight IWA and 20 age-matched controls. Experiment 1 targeted the role of unambiguous case morphology, while Experiment 2 looked at processing of number-agreement cues at the verb in caseambiguous sentences. IWA showed deficits in using both types of morphological markers as a cue to non-canonical sentence interpretation and the results indicate that in aphasia, processing of case-marking cues is more vulnerable as compared to verbagreement morphology. We ascribe this finding to the higher cue reliability of agreement cues, which renders them more resistant against impairments in aphasia. However, the online data revealed that IWA are in principle capable of successfully computing morphological cues, but the integration of morphological information is delayed as compared to age-matched controls. Furthermore, we found striking differences between controls and IWA regarding subject-before-object parsing predictions. While in case-unambiguous sentences IWA showed evidence for early subjectbefore-object parsing commitments, they exhibited no straightforward subject-first prediction in case-ambiguous sentences, although controls did so for ambiguous structures. IWA delayed their parsing decisions in case-ambiguous sentences until unambiguous morphological information, such as a subject-verbnumber-agreement cue, was available. We attribute the results for IWA to deficits in predictive processes based on morphosyntactic cues during sentence comprehension. The results indicate that IWA adopt a wait-and-see strategy and initiate prediction of upcoming syntactic structure only when unambiguous case or agreement cues are available. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. KW - Aphasia KW - Sentence comprehension deficits KW - Prediction KW - Eye-tracking KW - Online morpho-syntactic processing KW - Morphological cues Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2014.12.003 SN - 0911-6044 VL - 34 SP - 83 EP - 111 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schröder, Astrid A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - Stadie, Nicole T1 - Training-induced improvement of noncanonical sentence production does not generalize to comprehension: evidence for modality-specific processes JF - Cognitive neuropsychology N2 - The presence or absence of generalization after treatment can provide important insights into the functional relationship between cognitive processes. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between the cognitive processes that underlie sentence comprehension and production in aphasia. Using data from seven participants who took part in a case-series intervention study that focused on noncanonical sentence production [Stadie et al. (2008). Unambiguous generalization effects after treatment of noncanonical sentence production in German agrammatism. Brain and Language, 104, 211-229], we identified patterns of impairments and generalization effects for the two modalities. Results showed (a) dissociations between sentence structures and modalities before treatment, (b) an absence of cross-modal generalization from production to comprehension after treatment, and (c), a co-occurrence of spared comprehension before treatment and generalization across sentence structures within production after treatment. These findings are in line with the assumption of modality-specific, but interacting, cognitive processes in sentence comprehension and production. More specifically, this interaction is assumed to be unidirectional, allowing treatment-induced improvements in production to be supported by preserved comprehension. KW - syntactic processing of noncanonical sentences KW - sentence production KW - sentence comprehension KW - cross-modal generalization KW - aphasia treatment Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2014.968535 SN - 0264-3294 SN - 1464-0627 VL - 32 IS - 3-4 SP - 195 EP - 220 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Shaw, Jason A. A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. T1 - Stochastic Time Models of Syllable Structure JF - PLoS one N2 - Drawing on phonology research within the generative linguistics tradition, stochastic methods, and notions from complex systems, we develop a modelling paradigm linking phonological structure, expressed in terms of syllables, to speech movement data acquired with 3D electromagnetic articulography and X-ray microbeam methods. The essential variable in the models is syllable structure. When mapped to discrete coordination topologies, syllabic organization imposes systematic patterns of variability on the temporal dynamics of speech articulation. We simulated these dynamics under different syllabic parses and evaluated simulations against experimental data from Arabic and English, two languages claimed to parse similar strings of segments into different syllabic structures. Model simulations replicated several key experimental results, including the fallibility of past phonetic heuristics for syllable structure, and exposed the range of conditions under which such heuristics remain valid. More importantly, the modelling approach consistently diagnosed syllable structure proving resilient to multiple sources of variability in experimental data including measurement variability, speaker variability, and contextual variability. Prospects for extensions of our modelling paradigm to acoustic data are also discussed. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0124714 SN - 1932-6203 VL - 10 IS - 5 PB - PLoS CY - San Fransisco ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Engelmann, Felix A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Retrieval interference in reflexive processing: experimental evidence from Mandarin, and computational modeling JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - We conducted two eye-tracking experiments investigating the processing of the Mandarin reflexive ziji in order to tease apart structurally constrained accounts from standard cue-based accounts of memory retrieval. In both experiments, we tested whether structurally inaccessible distractors that fulfill the animacy requirement of ziji influence processing times at the reflexive. In Experiment 1, we manipulated animacy of the antecedent and a structurally inaccessible distractor intervening between the antecedent and the reflexive. In conditions where the accessible antecedent mismatched the animacy cue, we found inhibitory interference whereas in antecedent-match conditions, no effect of the distractor was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested only antecedent-match configurations and manipulated locality of the reflexive-antecedent binding (Mandarin allows non-local binding). Participants were asked to hold three distractors (animate vs. inanimate nouns) in memory while reading the target sentence. We found slower reading times when animate distractors were held in memory (inhibitory interference). Moreover, we replicated the locality effect reported in previous studies. These results are incompatible with structure-based accounts. However, the cue-based ACT-R model of Lewis and Vasishth (2005) cannot explain the observed pattern either. We therefore extend the original ACT-R model and show how this model not only explains the data presented in this article, but is also able to account for previously unexplained patterns in the literature on reflexive processing. KW - Chinese reflexives KW - ACT-R KW - eye-tracking KW - interference KW - cue-based retrieval KW - computational modeling KW - ziji KW - content-addressable memory Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00617 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pan, Hui-Yu A1 - Schimke, Sarah A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Referential context effects in non-native relative clause ambiguity resolution JF - International journal of bilingualism : cross-disciplinary, cross-linguistic studies of language behavior N2 - We report the results from two experiments investigating how referential context information affects native and non-native readers' interpretation of ambiguous relative clauses in sentences such as The journalist interviewed the assistant of the inspector who was looking very serious. The preceding discourse context was manipulated such that it provided two potential referents for either the first (the assistant) or the second (the inspector) of the two noun phrases that could potentially host the relative clause, thus biasing towards either an NP1 or an NP2 modification reading. The results from an offline comprehension task indicate that both native English speakers' and German and Chinese-speaking ESL learners' ultimate interpretation preferences were reliably influenced by the type of referential context. In contrast, in a corresponding self-paced-reading task we found that referential context information modulated only the non-native participants' disambiguation preferences but not the native speakers'. Our results corroborate and extend previous findings suggesting that non-native comprehenders' initial analysis of structurally ambiguous input is strongly influenced by biasing discourse information. KW - Second language KW - sentence processing KW - ambiguity resolution KW - referential context KW - relative clause KW - self-paced reading Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006913515769 SN - 1367-0069 SN - 1756-6878 VL - 19 IS - 3 SP - 298 EP - 313 PB - Sage Publ. CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kuhlmann, Marco A1 - Koller, Alexander A1 - Satta, Giorgio T1 - Lexicalization and Generative Power in CCG JF - Computational linguistics N2 - The weak equivalence of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) and Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG) is a central result of the literature on mildly context-sensitive grammar formalisms. However, the categorial formalism for which this equivalence has been established differs significantly from the versions of CCG that are in use today. In particular, it allows restriction of combinatory rules on a per grammar basis, whereas modern CCG assumes a universal set of rules, isolating all cross-linguistic variation in the lexicon. In this article we investigate the formal significance of this difference. Our main result is that lexicalized versions of the classical CCG formalism are strictly less powerful than TAG. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1162/COLI_a_00219 SN - 0891-2017 SN - 1530-9312 VL - 41 IS - 2 SP - 215 EP - 247 PB - MIT Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Benz, Lena A1 - Roeser, Jens A1 - Dillon, Brian W. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Teasing apart retrieval and encoding interference in the processing of anaphors JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing. KW - anaphors KW - reflexives KW - possessives KW - eye-tracking KW - German KW - Swedish KW - working-memory KW - interference Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00506 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Häussler, Jana A1 - Bader, Markus T1 - An interference account of the missing-VP effect JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Sentences with doubly center-embedded relative clauses in which a verb phrase (VP) is missing are sometimes perceived as grammatical, thus giving rise to an illusion of grammaticality. In this paper, we provide a new account of why missing-VP sentences, which are both complex and ungrammatical, lead to an illusion of grammaticality, the so-called missing-VP effect. We propose that the missing-VP effect in particular, and processing difficulties with multiply center-embedded clauses more generally, are best understood as resulting from interference during cue-based retrieval. When processing a sentence with double center-embedding, a retrieval error due to interference can cause the verb of an embedded clause to be erroneously attached into a higher clause. This can lead to an illusion of grammaticality in the case of missing-VP sentences and to processing complexity in the case of complete sentences with double center-embedding. Evidence for an interference account of the missing-VP effect comes from experiments that have investigated the missing-VP effect in German using a speeded grammaticality judgments procedure. We review this evidence and then present two new experiments that show that the missing-VP effect can be found in German also with less restricting procedures. One experiment was a questionnaire study which required grammaticality judgments from participants without imposing any time constraints. The second experiment used a self-paced reading procedure and did not require any judgments. Both experiments confirm the prior findings of missing-VP effects in German and also show that the missing-VP effect is subject to a primacy effect as known from the memory literature. Based on this evidence, we argue that an account of missing-VP effects in terms of interference during cue-based retrieval is superior to accounts in terms of limited memory resources or in terms of experience with embedded structures. KW - sentence parsing KW - center embedding KW - grammatical illusion KW - missing-VP effect KW - cue-based retrieval KW - interference KW - German Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00766 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Haendler, Yair A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold A1 - Adani, Flavia T1 - Discourse accessibility constraints in children's processing of object relative clauses JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Children's poor performance on object relative clauses has been explained in terms of intervention locality. This approach predicts that object relatives with a full DP head and an embedded pronominal subject are easier than object relatives in which both the head noun and the embedded subject are full DPs. This prediction is shared by other accounts formulated to explain processing mechanisms. We conducted a visual-world study designed to test the off-line comprehension and on-line processing of object relatives in German-speaking 5-year-olds. Children were tested on three types of object relatives, all having a full DP head noun and differing with respect to the type of nominal phrase that appeared in the embedded subject position: another full DP, a 1st- or a 3rd-person pronoun. Grammatical skills and memory capacity were also assessed in order to see whether and how they affect children's performance. Most accurately processed were object relatives with 1st-person pronoun, independently of children's language and memory skills. Performance on object relatives with two full DPs was overall more accurate than on object relatives with 3rd-person pronoun. In the former condition, children with stronger grammatical skills accurately processed the structure and their memory abilities determined how fast they were; in the latter condition, children only processed accurately the structure if they were strong both in their grammatical skills and in their memory capacity. The results are discussed in the light of accounts that predict different pronoun effects like the ones we find, which depend on the referential properties of the pronouns. We then discuss which role language and memory abilities might have in processing object relatives with various embedded nominal phrases. KW - child language KW - relative clauses KW - discourse KW - pronouns KW - intervention locality KW - visual-world paradigm Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00360 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cunnings, Ian A1 - Patterson, Clare A1 - Felser, Claudia 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 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Shalom, Diego E. A1 - Sigman, Mariano A1 - Lau, Ellen F. A1 - Phillips, Colin T1 - Agreement attraction in Spanish comprehension JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - Previous studies have found that English speakers experience attraction effects when comprehending subject-verb agreement, showing eased processing of ungrammatical sentences that contain a syntactically unlicensed but number-matching noun. In four self-paced reading experiments we examine whether attraction effects also occur in Spanish, a language where agreement morphology is richer and functionally more significant. We find that despite having a richer morphology, Spanish speakers show reliable attraction effects in comprehension, and that these effects are strikingly similar to those previously found in English in their magnitude and distributional profile. Further, we use distributional analyses to argue that cue-based memory retrieval is used as an error-driven mechanism in comprehension. We suggest that cross-linguistic similarities in agreement attraction result from speakers deploying repair or error-driven mechanisms uniformly across languages. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. KW - Agreement attraction KW - Number morphology KW - Spanish KW - Sentence comprehension Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.02.002 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 82 SP - 133 EP - 149 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Frank, Ulrike A1 - Frank, Katrin A1 - Zimmermann, Heinrich T1 - Effects of Respiratory Therapy (bagging) on Respiratory Function, Swallowing Frequency and Vigilance in Tracheotomized Patients in Early Neurorehabilitation JF - Pneumologie : Zeitschrift für Pneumologie und Beatmungsmedizin N2 - Objective: Tracheotomized patients often suffer from impairments in mucociliary clearance and limited capacities for active expectoration of secretions. We investigated the effects of a specific respiratory intervention method (bagging) for tracheotomized patients on respiratory parameters (pO(2), pCO(2), SpO(2), respiratory rates), swallowing frequency, vigilance and secretion viscosity. Methods: The bagging method supports enforced mobilization and expectoration of secretions by application of a series of manual hyperinflations with a resuscitation bag during active inspiration and manual cough support on the chest. 30 tracheotomized neurological patients participated in a multiple-baseline study including a three-weeks intervention period and a follow-up measurement three weeks after termination of the treatment. Results: Most outcome parameters improved significantly during the intervention period: pO(2) (p<.01), SpO(2) (p<.01), respiratory rates (p<.01), swallowing rates (p<.01), and vigilance scores (p<.01). The quality of bronchial secretions improved in all participants. All effects were sustained up to the follow-up measurements. Conclusion: This preliminary data indicates positive effects for a respiratory intervention method (bagging) on respiratory function and additional respiration-related functions in tracheotomized neurological patients. This easy-to-learn and inexpensive method might expand the range of treatment options for tracheotomized and non-responsive patients. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0034-1392359 SN - 0934-8387 SN - 1438-8790 VL - 69 IS - 7 SP - 394 EP - 399 PB - Thieme CY - Stuttgart ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Häussler, Jana A1 - Grant, Margaret A1 - Fanselow, Gisbert A1 - Frazier, Lyn T1 - Superiority in English and German: Cross-Language Grammatical Differences? JF - Syntax : a journal of theoretical, experimental and interdisciplinary research N2 - Do the grammars of English and German contain a ban on moving the lower of two wh-phrases (Superiority), or is the lower acceptability due simply to the complexity of processing the longer dependency that results when the lower wh-phrase is moved? The results of four acceptability-judgment studies suggest that a pure processing account is inadequate. Crossing wh-dependencies lower the acceptability of both German and English questions but with a significantly larger penalty in English than in German (experiment 1). The larger penalty in English cannot be attributed to greater sensitivity to violations in English, because relative clause island violations result in similar effects in the two languages (experiment 2). A pure processing account might claim long dependencies are easier to process in German than in English because of richer case, but a control experiment did not support this possibility (experiment 4). We suggest that moving the lower of two wh-phrases is banned in the grammar of English but not in the grammar of German. This predicts that there should be a penalty for crossing dependencies in English even in helpful (Bolinger) contexts, as confirmed in experiment 3, and even in short easy-to-process sentences, as confirmed by simple six-word sentences in Clifton, Fanselow & Frazier 2006. Finally, if German grammar does not contain a ban on crossing, it is not surprising that the penalty in German is smaller than in English or that like animacy of the two wh-phrases plays a larger role in German than in English because feature similarity generally gives rise to difficulty in processing, whereas in English a grammatical ban on crossing will reduce acceptability regardless of whether there is processing difficulty. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/synt.12030 SN - 1368-0005 SN - 1467-9612 VL - 18 IS - 3 SP - 235 EP - 265 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Hoboken ER - TY - JOUR A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Determinants of Scanpath Regularity in Reading JF - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society N2 - Scanpaths have played an important role in classic research on reading behavior. Nevertheless, they have largely been neglected in later research perhaps due to a lack of suitable analytical tools. Recently, von der Malsburg and Vasishth (2011) proposed a new measure for quantifying differences between scanpaths and demonstrated that this measure can recover effects that were missed with the traditional eyetracking measures. However, the sentences used in that study were difficult to process and scanpath effects accordingly strong. The purpose of the present study was to test the validity, sensitivity, and scope of applicability of the scanpath measure, using simple sentences that are typically read from left to right. We derived predictions for the regularity of scanpaths from the literature on oculomotor control, sentence processing, and cognitive aging and tested these predictions using the scanpath measure and a large database of eye movements. All predictions were confirmed: Sentences with short words and syntactically more difficult sentences elicited more irregular scanpaths. Also, older readers produced more irregular scanpaths than younger readers. In addition, we found an effect that was not reported earlier: Syntax had a smaller influence on the eye movements of older readers than on those of young readers. We discuss this interaction of syntactic parsing cost with age in terms of shifts in processing strategies and a decline of executive control as readers age. Overall, our results demonstrate the validity and sensitivity of the scanpath measure and thus establish it as a productive and versatile tool for reading research. KW - Eye movements KW - Reading KW - Scanpaths KW - Language understanding KW - Oculo-motor control KW - Individual differences KW - Aging KW - Development Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12208 SN - 0364-0213 SN - 1551-6709 VL - 39 IS - 7 SP - 1675 EP - 1703 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Hoboken ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Baer-Henney, Dinah A1 - Kügler, Frank A1 - van de Vijver, Ruben T1 - The Interaction of Language-Specific and Universal Factors During the Acquisition of Morphophonemic Alternations With Exceptions JF - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society N2 - Using the artificial language paradigm, we studied the acquisition of morphophonemic alternations with exceptions by 160 German adult learners. We tested the acquisition of two types of alternations in two regularity conditions while additionally varying length of training. In the first alternation, a vowel harmony, backness of the stem vowel determines backness of the suffix. This process is grounded in substance (phonetic motivation), and this universal phonetic factor bolsters learning a generalization. In the second alternation, tenseness of the stem vowel determines backness of the suffix vowel. This process is not based in substance, but it reflects a phonotactic property of German and our participants benefit from this language-specific factor. We found that learners use both cues, while substantive bias surfaces mainly in the most unstable situation. We show that language-specific and universal factors interact in learning. KW - Phonology KW - Exceptional alternation KW - Acquisition KW - Substance KW - Phonotactics KW - Artificial language paradigm Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12209 SN - 0364-0213 SN - 1551-6709 VL - 39 IS - 7 SP - 1537 EP - 1569 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Hoboken ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kügler, Frank A1 - Gollrad, Anja T1 - Production and perception of contrast: The case of the rise-fall contour in German JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - This study investigates the phonetics of German nuclear rise-fall contours in relation to contexts that trigger either a contrastive or a non-contrastive interpretation in the answer. A rise-fall contour can be conceived of a tonal sequence of L-H-L. A production study elicited target sentences in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts. The majority of cases realized showed a nuclear rise-fall contour. The acoustic analysis of these contours revealed a significant effect of contrastiveness on the height/alignment of the accent peak as a function of focus context. On the other hand, the height/alignment of the low turning point at the beginning of the rise did not show an effect of contrastiveness. In a series of semantic congruency perception tests participants judged the congruency of congruent and incongruent context-stimulus pairs based on three different sets of stimuli: (i) original data, (ii) manipulation of accent peak, and (iii) manipulation of the leading low. Listeners distinguished nuclear rise-fall contours as a function of focus context (Experiment 1 and 2), however not based on manipulations of the leading low (Experiment 3). The results suggest that the alignment and scaling of the accentual peak are sufficient to license a contrastive interpretation of a nuclear rise-fall contour, leaving the rising part as a phonetic onglide, or as a low tone that does not interact with the contrastivity of the context. KW - production of contrast KW - perception of contrast KW - semantic-congruency task KW - rise-fall contour KW - German intonation Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01254 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Arslan, Seçkin A1 - Bastiaanse, Roelien A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Looking at the evidence in visual world: eye-movements reveal how bilingual and monolingual Turkish speakers process grammatical evidentiality JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - This study presents pioneering data on how adult early bilinguals (heritage speakers) and late bilingual speakers of Turkish and German process grammatical evidentiality in a visual world setting in comparison to monolingual speakers of Turkish. Turkish marks evidentiality, the linguistic reference to information source, through inflectional affixes signaling either direct (-DI) or indirect (-mls) evidentiality. We conducted an eyetracking-during-listening experiment where participants were given access to visual 'evidence' supporting the use of either a direct or indirect evidential form. The behavioral results indicate that the monolingual Turkish speakers comprehended direct and indirect evidential scenarios equally well. In contrast, both late and early bilinguals were less accurate and slower to respond to direct than to indirect evidentials. The behavioral results were also reflected in the proportions of looks data. That is, both late and early bilinguals fixated less frequently on the target picture in the direct than in the indirect evidential condition while the monolinguals showed no difference between these conditions. Taken together, our results indicate reduced sensitivity to the semantic and pragmatic function of direct evidential forms in both late and early bilingual speakers, suggesting a simplification of the Turkish evidentiality system in Turkish heritage grammars. We discuss our findings with regard to theories of incomplete acquisition and first language attrition. KW - evidentiality KW - information source KW - inference KW - witnessing KW - visual world paradigm KW - eye-movements KW - Turkish-German bilingualism Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01387 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lausberg, Hedda A1 - Kazzer, Philipp A1 - Heekeren, Hauke R. A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell T1 - Pantomiming tool use with an imaginary tool in hand as compared to demonstration with tool in hand specifically modulates the left middle and superior temporal gyri JF - Cortex : a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behaviour N2 - Neuropsychological lesion studies evidence the necessity to differentiate between various forms of tool-related actions such as real tool use, tool use demonstration with tool in hand and without physical target object, and pantomime without tool in hand. However, thus far, neuroimaging studies have primarily focused only on investigating tool use pantomimes. The present fMRI study investigates pantomime without tool in hand as compared to tool use demonstration with tool in hand in order to explore patterns of cerebral signal modulation associated with acting with imaginary tools in hand. Fifteen participants performed with either hand (i) tool use pantomime with an imaginary tool in hand in response to visual tool presentation and (ii) tool use demonstration with tool in hand in response to visual-tactile tool presentation. In both conditions, no physical target object was present. The conjunction analysis of the right and left hands executions of tool use pantomime relative to tool use demonstration yielded significant activity in the left middle and superior temporal lobe. In contrast, demonstration relative to pantomime revealed large bihemispherically distributed homologous areas of activity. Thus far, fMRI studies have demonstrated the relevance of the left middle and superior temporal gyri in viewing, naming, and matching tools and related actions and contexts. Since in our study all these factors were equally (ir)relevant both in the tool use pantomime and the tool use demonstration conditions, the present findings enhance the knowledge about the function of these brain regions in tool-related cognitive processes. The two contrasted conditions only differ regarding the fact that the pantomime condition requires the individual to act with an imaginary tool in hand. Therefore, we suggest that the left middle and superior temporal gyri are specifically involved in integrating the projected mental image of a tool in the execution of a tool-specific movement concept. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. KW - Tool use pantomime KW - Tool use demonstration KW - Mental image KW - Left middle and superior temporal gyri KW - Hemispheric specialization Y1 - 2015 SN - 0010-9452 SN - 1973-8102 VL - 71 SP - 1 EP - 14 PB - Elsevier CY - Milano ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bruening, Benjamin A1 - Tran, Thuan T1 - The nature of the passive, with an analysis of Vietnamese JF - Lingua : international review of general linguistics N2 - We attempt to clarify a great deal of confusion in the literature on what a passive is, and what counts as a passive in different languages. We do this through a detailed investigation of what has been identified as a passive in Vietnamese, sentences with the morphemes bi and duoc. We also compare these to Mandarin Chinese bei. We show that these morphemes are not passive at all: like English auxiliaries, they may occur with either an active complement or a passive one. We clarify this point and what it means to be a passive. Second, sentences with these morphemes and the corresponding sentences without them are truth-conditionally equivalent. We show that the extra meaning they convey is a type of projective, or not-at-issue, meaning that is separate from the at-issue content of the sentence. We provide a detailed syntactic and semantic analysis of Vietnamese, and give arguments for this analysis. We propose that there is no movement in Vietnamese, but there is in Chinese, and this difference accounts for differences between the two languages. We also clarify what agent-oriented adverbs of the 'deliberately' type show, and draw conclusions about English get passives and tough constructions. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. KW - Passive KW - Vietnamese KW - Mandarin Chinese KW - Projective meaning KW - Agent-oriented adverbs Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.07.008 SN - 0024-3841 SN - 1872-6135 VL - 165 SP - 133 EP - 172 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Krause, Helena A1 - Bosch, Sina A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Morphosyntax in the bilingual mental lexicon : An Experimental Study of Strong Stems in German JF - Studies in second language acquisition Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263114000564 SN - 0272-2631 SN - 1470-1545 VL - 37 IS - 4 SP - 597 EP - 621 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - van de Koot, Hans A1 - Silva, Renita A1 - Felser, Claudia A1 - Sato, Mikako T1 - Does Dutch a-scrambling involve movement? Evidence from antecedent priming JF - The linguistic review N2 - The present study focuses on A-scrambling in Dutch, a local word-order alternation that typically signals the discourse-anaphoric status of the scrambled constituent. We use cross-modal priming to investigate whether an A-scrambled direct object gives rise to antecedent reactivation effects in the position where a movement theory would postulate a trace. Our results indicate that this is not the case, thereby providing support for a base-generation analysis of A-scrambling in Dutch. KW - scrambling KW - movement KW - cross-modal priming Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2015-0010 SN - 0167-6318 SN - 1613-3676 VL - 32 IS - 4 SP - 739 EP - 776 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER - TY - THES A1 - Bosch, Sina T1 - Morphosyntactic feature structure in the native and non-native mental lexicon BT - a priming study of stem allomorphy and inflectional affixes of German Y1 - 2015 ER - TY - THES A1 - Zaccarella, Emiliano T1 - Breaking down complexity BT - the neural basis of the syntactic merge mechanism in the human brain T2 - MPI series human cognitive and brain sciences ; 175 N2 - The unbounded expressive capacity of human language cannot boil down to an infinite list of sentences stored in a finite brain. Our linguistic knowledge is rather grounded around a rule-based universal syntactic computation—called Merge—which takes categorized units in input (e.g. this and ship), and generates structures by binding words recursively into more complex hierarchies of any length (e.g. this ship; this ship sinks…). Here we present data from different fMRI datasets probing the cortical implementation of this fundamental process. We first pushed complexity down to a three-word level, to explore how Merge creates minimally hierarchical phrases and sentences. We then moved to the most fundamental two-word level, to directly assess the universal invariant nature of Merge, when no additive mechanisms are involved. Our most general finding is that Merge as the basic syntactic operation is primarily performed by confined area, namely BA 44 in the IFG. Activity reduces to its most ventral-anterior portion at the most fundamental level, following fine-grained sub-anatomical parcellation proposed for the region. The deep frontal operculum/anterior-dorsal insula (FOP/adINS), a phylogenetically older and less specialized region, rather appears to support word-accumulation processing in which the categorical information of the word is first accessed based on its lexical status, and then maintained on hold before further processing takes place. The present data confirm the general notion of BA 44 being activated as a function of complex structural hierarchy, but they go beyond this view by proposing that structural sensitivity in BA 44 is already appreciated at the lowest levels of complexity during which minimal phrase-structures are build up, and syntactic Merge is assessed. Further, they call for a redefinition of BA 44 from multimodal area to a macro-region with internal localizable functional profiles Y1 - 2015 SN - 978-3-941504-60-8 PB - Max-Planck-Institute CY - Leipzig ER - TY - THES A1 - Baer-Henney, Dinah T1 - Learners' Little Helper BT - Strength and Weakness of the Substantive Bias Phonological Acquisition Y1 - 2015 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Haendler, Yair A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold A1 - Adani, Flavia T1 - Discourse accessibility constraints in children´s processing of object relative clauses JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Children’s poor performance on object relative clauses has been explained in terms of intervention locality. This approach predicts that object relatives with a full DP head and an embedded pronominal subject are easier than object relatives in which both the head noun and the embedded subject are full DPs. This prediction is shared by other accounts formulated to explain processing mechanisms. We conducted a visual-world study designed to test the off-line comprehension and on-line processing of object relatives in German-speaking 5-year-olds. Children were tested on three types of object relatives, all having a full DP head noun and differing with respect to the type of nominal phrase that appeared in the embedded subject position: another full DP, a 1st- or a 3rd-person pronoun. Grammatical skills and memory capacity were also assessed in order to see whether and how they affect children’s performance. Most accurately processed were object relatives with 1st-person pronoun, independently of children’s language and memory skills. Performance on object relatives with two full DPs was overall more accurate than on object relatives with 3rd-person pronoun. In the former condition, children with stronger grammatical skills accurately processed the structure and their memory abilities determined how fast they were; in the latter condition, children only processed accurately the structure if they were strong both in their grammatical skills and in their memory capacity. The results are discussed in the light of accounts that predict different pronoun effects like the ones we find, which depend on the referential properties of the pronouns. We then discuss which role language and memory abilities might have in processing object relatives with various embedded nominal phrases. KW - child language KW - relative clauses KW - discourse KW - pronouns KW - intervention locality KW - visual-world paradigm Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00860 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 IS - 860 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Häussler, Jana A1 - Bader, Markus T1 - An interference account of the missing-VP effect JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Sentences with doubly center-embedded relative clauses in which a verb phrase (VP) is missing are sometimes perceived as grammatical, thus giving rise to an illusion of grammaticality. In this paper, we provide a new account of why missing-VP sentences, which are both complex and ungrammatical, lead to an illusion of grammaticality, the so-called missing-VP effect. We propose that the missing-VP effect in particular, and processing difficulties with multiply center-embedded clauses more generally, are best understood as resulting from interference during cue-based retrieval. When processing a sentence with double center-embedding, a retrieval error due to interference can cause the verb of an embedded clause to be erroneously attached into a higher clause. This can lead to an illusion of grammaticality in the case of missing-VP sentences and to processing complexity in the case of complete sentences with double center-embedding. Evidence for an interference account of the missing-VP effect comes from experiments that have investigated the missing-VP effect in German using a speeded grammaticality judgments procedure. We review this evidence and then present two new experiments that show that the missing-VP effect can be found in German also with less restricting procedures. One experiment was a questionnaire study which required grammaticality judgments from participants without imposing any time constraints. The second experiment used a self-paced reading procedure and did not require any judgments. Both experiments confirm the prior findings of missing-VP effects in German and also show that the missing-VP effect is subject to a primacy effect as known from the memory literature. Based on this evidence, we argue that an account of missing-VP effects in terms of interference during cue-based retrieval is superior to accounts in terms of limited memory resources or in terms of experience with embedded structures. KW - sentence parsing KW - center embedding KW - grammatical illusion KW - missing-VP effect KW - cue-based retrieval KW - interference KW - German Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00766 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 IS - 766 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Engelmann, Felix A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Retrieval interference in reflexive processing BT - Experimental evidence from Mandarin, and computational modeling JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - We conducted two eye-tracking experiments investigating the processing of the Mandarin reflexive ziji in order to tease apart structurally constrained accounts from standard cue-based accounts of memory retrieval. In both experiments, we tested whether structurally inaccessible distractors that fulfill the animacy requirement of ziji influence processing times at the reflexive. In Experiment 1, we manipulated animacy of the antecedent and a structurally inaccessible distractor intervening between the antecedent and the reflexive. In conditions where the accessible antecedent mismatched the animacy cue, we found inhibitory interference whereas in antecedent-match conditions, no effect of the distractor was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested only antecedent-match configurations and manipulated locality of the reflexive-antecedent binding (Mandarin allows non-local binding). Participants were asked to hold three distractors (animate vs. inanimate nouns) in memory while reading the target sentence. We found slower reading times when animate distractors were held in memory (inhibitory interference). Moreover, we replicated the locality effect reported in previous studies. These results are incompatible with structure-based accounts. However, the cue-based ACT-R model of Lewis and Vasishth (2005) cannot explain the observed pattern either. We therefore extend the original ACT-R model and show how this model not only explains the data presented in this article, but is also able to account for previously unexplained patterns in the literature on reflexive processing. KW - Chinese reflexives KW - ACT-R KW - eye-tracking KW - interference KW - cue-based retrieval KW - computational modeling KW - ziji KW - content-addressable memory Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00617 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 IS - 617 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Benz, Lena A1 - Roeser, Jens A1 - Dillon, Brian W. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Teasing apart retrieval and encoding interference in the processing of anaphors JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing. KW - anaphors KW - reflexives KW - possessives KW - eye-tracking KW - German KW - Swedish KW - working-memory KW - interference Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00506 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 IS - 506 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - THES A1 - Geckin, Vasfiye T1 - The interpretation of logical connections by monolingual and bilingual children Y1 - 2015 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Gattei, Carolina A1 - Sigman, Mariano A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold T1 - Working memory differences in long-distance dependency resolution JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - There is a wealth of evidence showing that increasing the distance between an argument and its head leads to more processing effort, namely, locality effects; these are usually associated with constraints in working memory (DLT: Gibson, 2000; activation-based model: Lewis and Vasishth, 2005). In SOV languages, however, the opposite effect has been found: antilocality (see discussion in Levy et al., 2013). Antilocality effects can be explained by the expectation-based approach as proposed by Levy (2008) or by the activation-based model of sentence processing as proposed by Lewis and Vasishth (2005). We report an eye-tracking and a self-paced reading study with sentences in Spanish together with measures of individual differences to examine the distinction between expectation- and memory-based accounts, and within memory-based accounts the further distinction between DLT and the activation-based model. The experiments show that (i) antilocality effects as predicted by the expectation account appear only for high-capacity readers; (ii) increasing dependency length by interposing material that modifies the head of the dependency (the verb) produces stronger facilitation than increasing dependency length with material that does not modify the head; this is in agreement with the activation-based model but not with the expectation account; and (iii) a possible outcome of memory load on low-capacity readers is the increase in regressive saccades (locality effects as predicted by memory-based accounts) or, surprisingly, a speedup in the self-paced reading task; the latter consistent with good-enough parsing (Ferreira et al., 2002). In sum, the study suggests that individual differences in working memory capacity play a role in dependency resolution, and that some of the aspects of dependency resolution can be best explained with the activation-based model together with a prediction component. KW - locality KW - antilocality KW - working memory capacity KW - individual differences KW - Spanish KW - activation KW - DLT KW - expectation Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00312 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 6 IS - 312 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER -