TY  - GEN
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Fritzsche, Tom
A1  - Müller, Anja
T1  - Children’s Comprehension of Sentences with Focus Particles and the Role of Cognitive Control
BT  - An Eye Tracking Study with German-Learning 4-Year-Olds
N2  - Children’s interpretations of sentences containing focus particles do not seem adult-like until school age. This study investigates how German 4-year-old children comprehend sentences with the focus particle ‘nur’ (only) by using different tasks and controlling for the impact of general cognitive abilities on performance measures. Two sentence types with ‘only’ in either pre-subject or pre-object position were presented. Eye gaze data and verbal responses were collected via the visual world paradigm combined with a sentence-picture verification task. While the eye tracking data revealed an adult-like pattern of focus particle processing, the sentence-picture verification replicated previous findings of poor comprehension, especially for ‘only’ in pre-subject position. A second study focused on the impact of general cognitive abilities on the outcomes of the verification task. Working memory was related to children’s performance in both sentence types whereas inhibitory control was selectively related to the number of errors for sentences with ‘only’ in pre-subject position. These results suggest that children at the age of 4 years have the linguistic competence to correctly interpret sentences with focus particles, which–depending on specific task demands–may be masked by immature general cognitive abilities.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 287 
KW  - cognition
KW  - cognitive linguistics
KW  - cognitive psychology
KW  - eyes
KW  - human performance
KW  - sentence processing
KW  - syntax
KW  - working memory
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-90524
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Schmitz, Michaela
A1  - Müller, Anja
A1  - Weissenborn, Jürgen
T1  - The recognition of discontinuous verbal dependencies by German 19-month-olds : evidence for lexical and structural influences on children’s early processing capacities
N2  - Recent work has shown that English-learning 18-month-olds can detect the relationship between discontinuous morphemes such as is and -ing in Grandma is always running (Gomez, 2002; Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998) but only at a maximum of 3 intervening syllables. In this article we examine the tracking of discontinuous dependencies in children acquiring German. Due to freer word order, German allows for greater distances between dependent elements and a greater syntactic variety of the intervening elements than English does. The aim of this study was to investigate whether factors other than distance may influence the child’s capacity to recognize discontinuous elements. Our findings provide evidence that children’s recognition capacities are affected not only by distance but also by their ability to linguistically analyze the material intervening between the dependent elements. We speculate that this result supports the existence of processing mechanisms that reduce a discontinuous relation to a local one based on subcategorization relations.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - paper 024 
Y1  - 2006
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-16297
ER  -