TY - JOUR
A1 - Behzadnia, Ali
A1 - Rad, Mehdi Mehrani
T1 - Young children’s activity involvement and responses to yes/no questions
JF - Journal of psycholinguistic research
N2 - In the present study, we investigated younger and older Persian preschoolers' response tendency and accuracy toward yes/no questions about a coloring activity. Overall, 107 three- to four-year-olds and five- to six-year-old children were asked positive and negative yes/no questions about a picture coloring activity. The questions focused on three question contents namely, actions, environment and person. As for children's response tendency, they showed a compliance tendency. That is, they provided yes and no responses to positively and negatively formed questions respectively. Children especially younger ones were more compliant toward positive questions and their tendency decreased by age. In addition, the results revealed children's highest rate of compliance tendency toward environment inquiries. Concerning response accuracy, the effects of age and question content were significant. Specifically, older children provided more accurate responses than their younger counterparts, especially to yes/no questions asked about the actions performed during the activity. The findings suggest that depending on the format and the content of yes/no questions younger and older children's response accuracy and tendency differ.
KW - compliance tendency
KW - response accuracy
KW - suggestibility
KW - yes
KW - no
KW - questions
KW - young children
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-019-09685-4
SN - 0090-6905
SN - 1573-6555
VL - 49
IS - 3
SP - 401
EP - 414
PB - Springer
CY - New York
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Vogel, Ralf
T1 - Yet another Theta-System
Y1 - 2002
SN - 0301-4428
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 - 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 -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Schad, Daniel
A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno
A1 - Bürkner, Paul-Christian
A1 - Betancourt, Michael
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - Workflow techniques for the robust use of bayes factors
JF - Psychological methods
N2 - Inferences about hypotheses are ubiquitous in the cognitive sciences. Bayes factors provide one general way to compare different hypotheses by their compatibility with the observed data. Those quantifications can then also be used to choose between hypotheses. While Bayes factors provide an immediate approach to hypothesis testing, they are highly sensitive to details of the data/model assumptions and it's unclear whether the details of the computational implementation (such as bridge sampling) are unbiased for complex analyses. Hem, we study how Bayes factors misbehave under different conditions. This includes a study of errors in the estimation of Bayes factors; the first-ever use of simulation-based calibration to test the accuracy and bias of Bayes factor estimates using bridge sampling; a study of the stability of Bayes factors against different MCMC draws and sampling variation in the data; and a look at the variability of decisions based on Bayes factors using a utility function. We outline a Bayes factor workflow that researchers can use to study whether Bayes factors are robust for their individual analysis. Reproducible code is available from haps://osf.io/y354c/.
Translational Abstract
In psychology and related areas, scientific hypotheses are commonly tested by asking questions like "is [some] effect present or absent." Such hypothesis testing is most often carried out using frequentist null hypothesis significance testing (NIIST). The NHST procedure is very simple: It usually returns a p-value, which is then used to make binary decisions like "the effect is present/abscnt." For example, it is common to see studies in the media that draw simplistic conclusions like "coffee causes cancer," or "coffee reduces the chances of geuing cancer." However, a powerful and more nuanced alternative approach exists: Bayes factors. Bayes factors have many advantages over NHST. However, for the complex statistical models that arc commonly used for data analysis today, computing Bayes factors is not at all a simple matter. In this article, we discuss the main complexities associated with computing Bayes factors. This is the first article to provide a detailed workflow for understanding and computing Bayes factors in complex statistical models. The article provides a statistically more nuanced way to think about hypothesis testing than the overly simplistic tendency to declare effects as being "present" or "absent".
KW - Bayes factors
KW - Bayesian model comparison
KW - prior
KW - posterior
KW - simulation-based calibration
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000472
SN - 1082-989X
SN - 1939-1463
VL - 28
IS - 6
SP - 1404
EP - 1426
PB - American Psychological Association
CY - Washington
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Bosch, Sina
A1 - De Cesare, Ilaria
A1 - Demske, Ulrike
A1 - Felser, Claudia
T1 - Word-order variation and coherence in German infinitival complementation
JF - The journal of comparative Germanic linguistics
N2 - This study provides a synthesis of corpus-based and experimental investigations of word-order preferences in German infinitival complementation. We carried out a systematic analysis of present-day German corpora to establish frequency distributions of different word-order options: extraposition, intraposition, and 'third construction'. We then examined, firstly, whether and to what extent corpus frequencies and processing economy constraints can predict the acceptability of these three word-order variants, and whether subject raising and subject control verbs form clearly distinguishable subclasses of infinitive-embedding verbs in terms of their word-order behaviour. Secondly, our study looks into the issue of coherence by comparing acceptability ratings for monoclausal coherent and biclausal incoherent construals of intraposed infinitives, and by examining whether a biclausal incoherent analysis gives rise to local and/or global processing difficulty. Taken together, our results revealed that (i) whilst the extraposition pattern consistently wins out over all other word-order variants for control verbs, neither frequency nor processing-based approaches to word-order variation can account for the acceptability of low-frequency variants, (ii) there is considerable verb-specific variation regarding word-order preferences both between and within the two sets of raising and control verbs under investigation, and (iii) although monoclausal coherent intraposition is rated above biclausal incoherent intraposition, the latter is not any more difficult to process than the former. Our findings indicate that frequency of occurrence and processing-related constraints interact with idiosyncratic lexical properties of individual verbs in determining German speakers' structural preferences.
KW - Syntactic variation
KW - German
KW - Infinitives
KW - Corpus linguistics
KW - Acceptability judgements
KW - Self-paced reading
Y1 - 2023
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-023-09140-8
SN - 1572-8552
VL - 26
IS - 1
PB - Springer
CY - New York
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Höhle, Barbara
A1 - van de Vijver, Ruben
A1 - Weisenborn, J.
T1 - Word processing at 19 months at its relation to language performance at 30 months : a retrospective analysis of data from German learning children
Y1 - 2006
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Garcia, Rowena
A1 - Dery, Jeruen E.
A1 - Roeser, Jens
A1 - Höhle, Barbara
T1 - Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children
JF - First language
N2 - This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the children produced mainly agent-initial constructions regardless of voice. This agent-initial preference, despite the lack of a close link between the agent and the subject in Tagalog, shows that this word order preference is not merely syntactically-driven (subject-initial preference). Additionally, the children’s agent-initial preference in the agent voice, contrary to the adults’ lack of preference, shows that children do not respect the subject-last principle of ordering Tagalog full noun phrases. These results suggest that language-specific optional features like a subject-last principle take longer to be acquired.
KW - Child language acquisition
KW - sentence production
KW - Tagalog acquisition
KW - voice
KW - word order
Y1 - 2018
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723718790317
SN - 0142-7237
SN - 1740-2344
VL - 38
IS - 6
SP - 617
EP - 640
PB - Sage Publ.
CY - London
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Skopeteas, Stavros
A1 - Féry, Caroline
A1 - Asatiani, Rusudan
T1 - Word order and intonation in Georgian
N2 - Georgian is famous for its word order flexibility: all permutations of constituent order are possible and the choice among them is primarily determined by information structure. In this paper, we show that word order is not the only means to encode information structure in this language, but it is used in combination with sentence prosody. After a preliminary description of the use of prosodic phrasing and intonation for this purpose, we address the question of the interrelation between these two strategies. Based on experimental evidence, we investigate the interaction of focus with word order and prosody, and we conclude that some aspects of word order variation are pragmatically vacuous and can be accommodated in any context if they are realized with an appropriate prosodic structure, while other word order phenomena are quite restrictive and cannot be overridden through prosodic manipulations.
Y1 - 2009
UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00243841
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2008.09.001
SN - 0024-3841
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Fargier, Raphael
A1 - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris
A1 - Pinet, Svetlana
A1 - Alario, F. -Xavier
A1 - Laganaro, Marina
T1 - Word onset phonetic properties and motor artifacts in speech production EEG recordings
JF - Psychophysiology : journal of the Society for Psychophysiological Research
N2 - Electrophysiological research using verbal response paradigms faces the problem of muscle artifacts that occur during speech production or in the period preceding articulation. In this context, this paper has two related aims. The first is to show how the nature of the first phoneme influences the alignment of the ERPs. The second is to further characterize the EEG signal around the onset of articulation, both in temporal and frequency domains. Participants were asked to name aloud pictures of common objects. We applied microstate analyses and time-frequency transformations of ERPs locked to vocal onset to compare the EEG signal between voiced and unvoiced labial plosive word onset consonants. We found a delay of about 40 ms in the set of stable topographic patterns for /b/ relative to /p/ onset words. A similar shift was observed in the power increase of gamma oscillations (30-50 Hz), which had an earlier onset for /p/ trials (similar to 150 ms before vocal onset). This 40-ms shift is consistent with the length of the voiced proportion of the acoustic signal prior to the release of the closure in the vocal responses. These results demonstrate that phonetic features are an important parameter affecting response-locked ERPs, and hence that the onset of the acoustic energy may not be an optimal trigger for synchronizing the EEG activity to the response in vocal paradigms. The indexes explored in this study provide a step forward in the characterization of muscle-related artifacts in electrophysiological studies of speech and language production.
KW - EEG
KW - motor artifact
KW - phonetics
KW - picture naming
KW - speech production
Y1 - 2017
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.12982
SN - 0048-5772
SN - 1469-8986
VL - 55
IS - 2
PB - Wiley
CY - Hoboken
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 - Czapka, Sophia
A1 - Festman, Julia
T1 - Wisconsin Card Sorting Test reveals a monitoring advantage but not a switching advantage in multilingual children
JF - Journal of experimental child psychology : JECP
N2 - The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is used to test higher-level executive functions or switching, depending on the measures chosen in a study and its goal. Many measures can be extracted from the WCST, but how to assign them to specific cognitive skills remains unclear. Thus, the current study first aimed at identifying which measures test the same cognitive abilities. Second, we compared the performance of mono- and multilingual children in the identified abilities because there is some evidence that bilingualism can improve executive functions. We tested 66 monolingual and 56 multilingual (i.e., bi- and trilingual) primary school children (M-age = 109 months) in an online version of the classic WCST. A principal component analysis revealed four factors: problem-solving, monitoring, efficient errors, and perseverations. Because the assignment of measures to factors is only partially coherent across the literature, we identified this as one of the sources of task impurity. In the second part, we calculated regression analyses to test for group differences while controlling for intelligence as a predictor for executive functions and for confounding variables such as age, German lexicon size, and socioeconomic status. Intelligence predicted problem solving and perseverations. In the monitoring component (measured by the reaction times preceding a rule switch), multilinguals outperformed monolinguals, thereby supporting the view that bi- or multilingualism can improve processing speed related to monitoring.
KW - Executive functions
KW - Switching
KW - Monitoring
KW - Multilingualism
KW - Factor
KW - analysis
KW - Bilingual advantage
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2020.105038
SN - 0022-0965
SN - 1096-0457
VL - 204
PB - Elsevier
CY - Amsterdam
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Zimmermann, Malte
T1 - Wird Schon Stimmen!
BT - A Degree Operator Analysis of Schon
JF - Journal of semantics
N2 - The article puts forward a novel analysis of the German modal particle schon as a modal degree operator over propositional content. The proposed analysis offers a uniform perspective on the semantics of modal schon and its aspectual counterpart meaning ‘already’: Both particles are analyzed as denoting a degree operator, expressing a scale-based comparison over relevant alternatives. The alternatives are determined by focus in the case of aspectual schon (Krifka 2000), but are restricted to the polar alternatives p and ¬p in the case of modal schon. Semantically, modal schon introduces a presupposition to the effect that the circumstantial conversational background contains more factual evidence in favor of p than in favor of ¬p, thereby making modal schon the not at-issue counterpart of the overt comparative form eher ‘rather’ (Herburger & Rubinstein 2014). The analysis incorporates basic insights from earlier analyses of modal schon in a novel way, and it also offers new insights as to the underlying workings of modality in natural language as involving propositions rather than possible worlds (Kratzer 1977, 2012).
Y1 - 2018
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffy010
SN - 0167-5133
SN - 1477-4593
VL - 35
IS - 4
SP - 687
EP - 739
PB - Oxford Univ. Press
CY - Oxford
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Błaszczak, Joanna
T1 - Why is a predicate inversion analysis problematic?
BT - Insights from existential, locative and possessive constructions
JF - Of trees and birds. A Festschrift for Gisbert Fanselow
KW - Festschrift
KW - Informationsstruktur
KW - Linguistik
KW - Morphologie
KW - Syntax
KW - festschrift
KW - information structure
KW - linguistics
KW - morphology
KW - syntax
Y1 - 2019
U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-432240
SN - 978-3-86956-457-9
SP - 119
EP - 133
PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam
CY - Potsdam
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Penner, Zvi
A1 - Tracy, Rosemarie
A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen
T1 - Where scrambling begins : triggering object scrambling at the early stage German and Bernese Swiss German
Y1 - 2000
SN - 0-7923-6249-7
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Schotter, Elizabeth Roye
A1 - Leinenger, Mallorie
A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban
T1 - When your mind skips what your eyes fixate
BT - how forced fixations lead to comprehension illusions in reading
JF - Psychonomic bulletin & review : a journal of the Psychonomic Society
N2 - The phenomenon of forced fixations suggests that readers sometimes fixate a word (due to oculomotor constraints) even though they intended to skip it (due to parafoveal cognitive-linguistic processing). We investigate whether this leads readers to look directly at a word but not pay attention to it. We used a gaze-contingent boundary paradigm to dissociate parafoveal and foveal information (e.g., the word phone changed to scarf once the reader's eyes moved to it) and asked questions about the sentence to determine which one the reader encoded. When the word was skipped or fixated only briefly (i.e., up to 100 ms) readers were more likely to report reading the parafoveal than the fixated word, suggesting that there are cases in which readers look directly at a word but their minds ignore it, leading to the illusion of reading something they did not fixate.
KW - Word recognition
KW - Text comprehension
KW - Eye movements and reading
Y1 - 2017
U6 - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-017-1356-y
SN - 1069-9384
SN - 1531-5320
VL - 25
IS - 5
SP - 1884
EP - 1890
PB - Springer
CY - New York
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Bürki, Audrey
A1 - Alario, F-Xavier
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - When words collide: Bayesian meta-analyses of distractor and target properties in the picture-word interference paradigm
JF - Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
N2 - In the picture-word interference paradigm, participants name pictures while ignoring a written or spoken distractor word. Naming times to the pictures are slowed down by the presence of the distractor word. The present study investigates in detail the impact of distractor and target word properties on picture naming times, building on the seminal study by Miozzo and Caramazza. We report the results of several Bayesian meta-analyses based on 26 datasets. These analyses provide estimates of effect sizes and their precision for several variables and their interactions. They show the reliability of the distractor frequency effect on picture naming latencies (latencies decrease as the frequency of the distractor increases) and demonstrate for the first time the impact of distractor length, with longer naming latencies for trials with longer distractors. Moreover, distractor frequency interacts with target word frequency to predict picture naming latencies. The methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
KW - Picture-word interference
KW - Bayesian meta-analysis
KW - distractor frequency
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221114644
SN - 1747-0218
SN - 1747-0226
VL - 76
IS - 6
SP - 1410
EP - 1430
PB - Sage Publications
CY - London
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Kitagawa, Yoshihisa
ED - Ishihara, Shinichiro
ED - Petrova, Svetlana
ED - Schwarz, Anne
T1 - When we fail to question in Japanese
JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632
N2 - When we pay close attention to the prosody of Wh-questions in Japanese, we discover many novel and interesting empirical puzzles that would require us to devise a much finer syntactic component of grammar. This paper addresses the issues that pose some problems to such an elaborated grammar, and offers solutions, making an appeal to the information structure and sentence processing involved in the interpretation of interrogative and focus constructions.
KW - focus
KW - (implicit) prosody
KW - information structure
KW - processing
KW - Wh-question
Y1 - 2007
U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-24481
SN - 1866-4725
SN - 1614-4708
VL - 9
SP - 29
EP - 64
PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam
CY - Potsdam
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Hall, Joan Kelly
A1 - Malabarba, Taiane
A1 - Kimura, Daisuke
T1 - What’s Symmetrical?
BT - A Teacher’s Cooperative Management of Learner Turns in a Read-aloud Activity
JF - The Embodied Work of Teaching
N2 - This chapter investigates teacher management of learner turns in an American second-grade classroom during a read-aloud activity. A read-aloud is a whole-group instructional activity which involves a teacher read-ing aloud a book to a cohort of students as they listen (Tainio & Slotte, 2017). Using ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) and drawing on the concepts of alignment and affi liation (Steensig, 2012; Stivers, 2008; Stivers et al., 2011), we investigate how embodied practices such as gaze, facial expressions, body positioning and gestures in addition to verbal practices are used by the teacher separately and together to respond to learner turns in ways that keep the learners aff ectively engaged and, at the same time, ensure the orderly progression of the lesson. Our analysis shows that teacher cooperative management of learners’ turns involves: (1) orient-ing to them as affi liative tokens in order to neutralize their disaligning force while still treating learners as cooperative participants in the activity; and (2) managing turns not only according to their sequential positions and the actions they project but, just as importantly, to the larger instructional proj-ect being accomplished. The study contributes to the re-specifi cation of the everyday grounds of teaching in order to broaden understandings of the specialized nature of such work (Macbeth, 2014).
Y1 - 2019
SN - 978-1-78892-548-8
SN - 978-1-78892-550-1
SN - 978-1-78892-549-5
U6 - https://doi.org/10.21832/9781788925501-006
VL - 75
SP - 37
EP - 56
PB - Multilingual Matters
CY - Bristol
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Jaensch, Carol
A1 - Heyer, Vera
A1 - Gordon, Peter
A1 - Clahsen, Harald
T1 - What plurals and compounds reveal about constraints in word formation
JF - Language acquisition : a journal of developmental linguistics
N2 - Morphological systems are constrained in how they interact with each other. One case that has been widely studied in the psycholinguistic literature is the avoidance of plurals inside compounds (e.g. *rats eater vs. rat eater) in English and other languages, the so-called plurals-in-compounds effect. Several previous studies have shown that both adult and child speakers are sensitive to this contrast, but the question of whether semantic, morphological, or surface-form constraints are responsible for the plurals-in-compounds effect remains controversial. The present study provides new empirical evidence from adult and child English to resolve this controversy. Graded linguistic judgments were obtained from 96 children (age range: 7;06 to 12;08) and 32 adults. In the task, participants were asked to rate compounds containing different kinds of singular or plural modifiers. The results indicated that both children and adults disliked regular plurals inside compounds, whereas irregular plurals were rated as marginal and singulars as fully acceptable. Furthermore, acceptability ratings were found not to be affected by the phonological surface form of a compound-internal modifier. We conclude that semantic and morphological (rather than surface-form) constraints are responsible for the plurals-in-compounds effect, in both children and adults.
Y1 - 2014
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2014.892949
SN - 1048-9223
SN - 1532-7817
VL - 21
IS - 4
SP - 319
EP - 338
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - Abingdon
ER -