TY - JOUR A1 - Boston, Marisa Ferrara A1 - Hale, John T. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold T1 - Parallel processing and sentence comprehension difficulty JF - Language and cognitive processes N2 - Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty, but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers' eye fixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses as new words are integrated; and retrieval, which quantifies comprehension difficulty in terms of working memory constraints. We examine the predictions of both metrics using a family of dependency parsers indexed by an upper limit on the number of candidate syntactic analyses they retain at successive words. Surprisal models all fixation measures and regression probability. By contrast, retrieval does not model any measure in serial processing. As more candidate analyses are considered in parallel at each word, retrieval can account for the same measures as surprisal. This pattern suggests an important role for ranked parallelism in theories of sentence comprehension. KW - Reading KW - Parsing KW - Computer model KW - Corpus Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2010.492228 SN - 0169-0965 VL - 26 IS - 3 SP - 301 EP - 349 PB - Wiley CY - Hove ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Telkemeyer, Silke A1 - Rossi, Sonja A1 - Nierhaus, Till A1 - Steinbrink, Jens A1 - Obrig, Hellmuth A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell T1 - Acoustic processing of temporally modulated sounds in infants evidence from a combined near-infrared spectroscopy and EEG study JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Speech perception requires rapid extraction of the linguistic content from the acoustic signal. The ability to efficiently process rapid changes in auditory information is important for decoding speech and thereby crucial during language acquisition. Investigating functional networks of speech perception in infancy might elucidate neuronal ensembles supporting perceptual abilities that gate language acquisition. Interhemispheric specializations for language have been demonstrated in infants. How these asymmetries are shaped by basic temporal acoustic properties is under debate. We recently provided evidence that newborns process non-linguistic sounds sharing temporal features with language in a differential and lateralized fashion. The present study used the same material while measuring brain responses of 6 and 3 month old infants using simultaneous recordings of electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). NIRS reveals that the lateralization observed in newborns remains constant over the first months of life. While fast acoustic modulations elicit bilateral neuronal activations, slow modulations lead to right-lateralized responses. Additionally, auditory-evoked potentials and oscillatory EEG responses show differential responses for fast and slow modulations indicating a sensitivity for temporal acoustic variations. Oscillatory responses reveal an effect of development, that is, 6 but not 3 month old infants show stronger theta-band desynchronization for slowly modulated sounds. Whether this developmental effect is due to increasing fine-grained perception for spectrotemporal sounds in general remains speculative. Our findings support the notion that a more general specialization for acoustic properties can be considered the basis for lateralization of speech perception. The results show that concurrent assessment of vascular based imaging and electrophysiological responses have great potential in the research on language acquisition. KW - infants KW - speech perception KW - language acquisition KW - auditory processing KW - near-infrared spectroscopy KW - event related potentials KW - brain oscillations Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00062 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 2 IS - 2 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hanne, Sandra A1 - Sekerina, Irina A. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Burchert, Frank A1 - De Bleser, Ria T1 - Chance in agrammatic sentence comprehension what does it really mean? Evidence from eye movements of German agrammatic aphasic patients JF - Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal N2 - Background: In addition to the canonical subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, German also allows for non-canonical order (OVS), and the case-marking system supports thematic role interpretation. Previous eye-tracking studies (Kamide et al., 2003; Knoeferle, 2007) have shown that unambiguous case information in non-canonical sentences is processed incrementally. For individuals with agrammatic aphasia, comprehension of non-canonical sentences is at chance level (Burchert et al., 2003). The trace deletion hypothesis (Grodzinsky 1995, 2000) claims that this is due to structural impairments in syntactic representations, which force the individual with aphasia (IWA) to apply a guessing strategy. However, recent studies investigating online sentence processing in aphasia (Caplan et al., 2007; Dickey et al., 2007) found that divergences exist in IWAs' sentence-processing routines depending on whether they comprehended non-canonical sentences correctly or not, pointing rather to a processing deficit explanation. Aims: The aim of the current study was to investigate agrammatic IWAs' online and offline sentence comprehension simultaneously in order to reveal what online sentence-processing strategies they rely on and how these differ from controls' processing routines. We further asked whether IWAs' offline chance performance for non-canonical sentences does indeed result from guessing. Methods Procedures: We used the visual-world paradigm and measured eye movements (as an index of online sentence processing) of controls (N = 8) and individuals with aphasia (N = 7) during a sentence-picture matching task. Additional offline measures were accuracy and reaction times. Outcomes Results: While the offline accuracy results corresponded to the pattern predicted by the TDH, IWAs' eye movements revealed systematic differences depending on the response accuracy. Conclusions: These findings constitute evidence against attributing IWAs' chance performance for non-canonical structures to mere guessing. Instead, our results support processing deficit explanations and characterise the agrammatic parser as deterministic and inefficient: it is slowed down, affected by intermittent deficiencies in performing syntactic operations, and fails to compute reanalysis even when one is detected. KW - Eye movements KW - Non-canonical sentences KW - Agrammatic aphasia KW - Broca's aphasia KW - Chance performance KW - Online and offline processing KW - Sentence comprehension disorders KW - German syntax Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2010.489256 SN - 0268-7038 VL - 25 IS - 2 SP - 221 EP - 244 PB - Wiley CY - Hove ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Prickett, David James T1 - 'We will show you Berlin' space, leisure, flanerie and sexuality JF - Leisure studies : the journal of the Leisure Studies Association N2 - Both the seat of the German government and the capitol of queer German culture, Berlin has been that spatial nexus of politics, sexuality and gender, work and leisure that has enabled the development of multifarious sexual and gender identities. This has caused celebration and consternation among Germans and foreigners alike. Contemporary studies of urban homosexual space cite an erosion of its 'authenticity' when cities market homosexual space in order to attract tourists. My literary analysis shows that Berlin's homosexual male culture and space had already been subject to commoditisation in the Weimar period (1918-1933), when Berliners discovered marketing potential in the French slight la vice allemand [the German vice] - male homosexuality. This article's examination of Weimar Berlin's spatial binary as 'sexy space' and 'sexualised place' in literature by Klaus Mann and Curt Moreck engages with current debates in leisure studies on the gendering and sexing of geography and leisure. Central to this re-evaluation of leisure and tourism in Weimar Berlin is my discussion of flanerie: the figure of the flaneuse indicates that flanerie was not the lone dominion of heterosexual men. In the context of urban leisure and male homosexuality, I argue that Weimar Berlin consistently and successfully negotiated its dual function of sexy space (allowing self-fashioning for homosexual men in Berlin) and sexualised place (voyeurism and sexual exploration for Berlin's newcomers and tourists). KW - tourism KW - consumer culture KW - gender KW - geography KW - history KW - arts Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2010.523836 SN - 0261-4367 VL - 30 IS - 2 SP - 157 EP - 177 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kadyamusuma, McLoddy R. A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Mayer, Jörg T1 - Perceptual discrimination of Shona lexical tones and low-pass filtered speech by left and right hemisphere damaged patients JF - Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal N2 - Background: While the role of the right hemisphere (RH) in prosodic processing is prominent, research on the perception of lexical tones has shown that left hemisphere damaged (LHD) patients are more impaired than right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients. Dichotic listening and imaging studies with healthy speakers of tone languages demonstrate that at least at the phonemic and lexical level, prosody is processed in the left hemisphere (LH) when the variations in pitch are phonemically distinctive. There is no report available yet on the perceptual discrimination of a Bantu language in patients after unilateral brain damage. Aims: We addressed the question of how well Shona aphasic patients and right hemisphere damaged patients perceive pitch contrasts in Shona lexical words and also in their homologous low-pass filtered counterparts. We also sought to discover the validity of the current hypotheses on hemispheric lateralisation particularly the hypothesis on hemispheric lateralisation based on language function to account for the Shona data. Methods Procedures: A total of 7 LHD and 7 RHD patients and 14 healthy controls participated in two discrimination tasks that examined perception of lexical tone in (a) bisyllabic Shona words and (b) low-pass filtered stimuli. In both tasks the participants were tasked with judging the pitch as the same or different in 120 bisyllabic words and 120 low-pass filtered stimuli. Outcomes Results: The results demonstrated that the tonal discrimination of the LHD group was more reduced in comparison to the RHD group and control participants. However, the performance of the RHD patients was not error free relative to the control participants, although significantly better than the LHD patients in both tasks. Conclusions: At least for the phonemic and lexical levels, brain damage to the dominant hemisphere results in lexical tone impairment for LHD patients, and cognitive load processing results in a subdued but good performance for RHD patients. The LH is therefore dominant for processing tone when it is lexically distinctive. KW - Brain damage KW - Shona KW - Lexical tones KW - Perception KW - Low-pass filtered stimuli KW - Pitch discrimination Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2010.540336 SN - 0268-7038 VL - 25 IS - 5 SP - 576 EP - 592 PB - Wiley CY - Hove ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fanselow, Gisbert A1 - Schlesewsky, Matthias A1 - Vogel, Ralf A1 - Weskott, Thomas T1 - Animacy effects on crossing wh-movement in German JF - Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences N2 - This article presents several acceptability rating experiments concerned with crossing wh-movement in German multiple questions. Our results show that there is no general superiority effect in German, thus refuting claims to the contrary by Featherston (2005). However, acceptability is reduced when a wh-phrase crosses a wh-subject with which it agrees in animacy. We explain this finding in terms of the availability of different sorting keys for the answers to the multiple questions. Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/LING.2011.021 SN - 0024-3949 VL - 49 IS - 4 SP - 657 EP - 683 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kadyamusuma, McLoddy R. A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Mayer, Jörg T1 - Lexical tone disruption in Shona after brain damage JF - Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal N2 - Background: The issue of production and perception of lexical tone in patients with brain lesions has been investigated mainly through East Asian languages and Norwegian. The present study investigated the lateralisation of lexical tone in Shona, a Bantu language. Van Lancker (1980) proposed a continuum scale of the levels of functional pitch in the speech signal. According to the functional lateralisation account (FLH), the left hemisphere (LH) is associated with highly structured pitch contrasts, such as phonological tone, whereas the right hemisphere (RH) is specialised for the least structured pitch functions cueing emotional and personal information. The extant data show that the ability to produce and identify lexical tone is frequently more impaired as a result of lesions to the LH than RH lesions. Aims: The present investigation focused on the lateralisation of lexical tone in Shona speakers. The study sought to validate if the scale of hemispheric lateralisation as proposed by Van Lancker (1980) is also valid for Shona, a Bantu language. Methods & Procedures: We examined five LH damaged (LHD) patients and five RH (RHD) damaged patients using a confrontational picture-naming task and a lexical tone identification task of Shona lexical tone. The first experiment investigated the ability of LHD patients and RHD patients to identify Shona lexical tone in 60 disyllabic minimal pairs. The second experiment examined the ability of Shona brain-damaged patients to produce lexical tone using a confrontational picture-naming task with 120 lexical items. Outcomes & Results: We observed a dissociation in the performance of both the LHD and RHD patients in the two tasks. Both groups were impaired in the tone identification task relative to the non-brain-damaged controls. However, RHD patients performed significantly better than the LHD patients in the tone identification task. On the other hand, both LHD and RHD groups were equally impaired in the tone production task in comparison to the controls. Conclusions: The discrepancy in the production and perception of Shona lexical tone for this group of brain-damaged patients shows that, although the two modes are related, they do not always get disrupted at the same level after brain damage. The results from the tone identification task suggest to a certain extent that the FLH is also valid for Shona. In order to account for all the data there is need to carefully consider alternative accounts like the acoustic cue hypothesis (Van Lancker & Sidtis, 1992). KW - Brain-damaged patients KW - Lexical tone KW - Shona KW - Aphasia KW - Production KW - Identification Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2011.590966 SN - 0268-7038 VL - 25 IS - 10 SP - 1239 EP - 1260 PB - Wiley CY - Hove ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - The grammatical expression of focus in West Chadic variation and uniformity in and across languages JF - Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences N2 - The article provides an overview of the grammatical realization of focus in four West Chadic languages (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic). The languages discussed exhibit an intriguing crosslinguistic variation in the realization of focus, both among themselves as well as compared to European intonation languages. They also display language-internal variation in the formal realization of focus. The West Chadic languages differ widely in their ways of expressing focus, which range from syntactic over prosodic to morphological devices. In contrast to European intonation languages, the focus marking systems of the West Chadic languages are inconsistent in that focus is often not grammatically expressed, but these inconsistencies are shown to be systematic. Subject foci (contrastive or not) and contrastive nonsubject foci are always grammatically marked, whereas information focus on nonsubjects need not be marked as such. The absence of formal focus marking supports pragmatic theories of focus in terms of contextual resolution. The special status of focused subjects and contrastive foci is derived from the Contrastive Focus Hypothesis, which requires unexpected foci and unexpected focus contents to be marked as such, together with the assumption that canonical subjects in West Chadic receive a default interpretation as topics. Finally, I discuss certain focus ambiguities which are not attested in intonation languages, nor do they follow on standard accounts of focus marking, but which can be accounted for in terms of constraint interaction in the formal expression of focus. Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/LING.2011.032 SN - 0024-3949 VL - 49 IS - 5 SP - 1163 EP - 1213 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Wiese, Heike T1 - So as a focus marker in German JF - Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences N2 - This paper discusses a hitherto undescribed usage of the particle so as a dedicated focus marker in contemporary German. I discuss grammatical and pragmatic characteristics of this focus marker, supporting my account with natural linguistic data and with controlled experimental evidence showing that so has a significant influence on speakers' understanding of what the focus expression in a sentence is. Against this background, I sketch a possible pragmaticalization path from referential usages of so via hedging to a semantically bleached focus marker, which, unlike particles such as auch 'also'/'too' or nur 'only', does not contribute any additional meaning. Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/LING.2011.028 SN - 0024-3949 VL - 49 IS - 5 SP - 991 EP - 1039 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fanselow, Gisbert A1 - Lenertova, Denisa T1 - Left peripheral focus mismatches between syntax and information structure JF - Natural language & linguistic theory N2 - In Czech, German, and many other languages, part of the semantic focus of the utterance can be moved to the left periphery of the clause. The main generalization is that only the leftmost accented part of the semantic focus can be moved. We propose that movement to the left periphery is generally triggered by an unspecific edge feature of C (Chomsky 2008) and its restrictions can be attributed to requirements of cyclic linearization, modifying the theory of cyclic linearization developed by Fox and Pesetsky (2005). The crucial assumption is that structural accent is a direct consequence of being linearized at merge, thus it is indirectly relevant for (locality restrictions on) movement. The absence of structural accent correlates with givenness. Given elements may later receive (topic or contrastive) accents, which accounts for fronting in multiple focus/contrastive topic constructions. Without any additional assumptions, the model can account for movement of pragmatically unmarked elements to the left periphery ('formal fronting', Frey 2005). Crucially, the analysis makes no reference at all to concepts of information structure in the syntax, in line with the claim of Chomsky (2008) that UG specifies no direct link between syntax and information structure. KW - Czech KW - German KW - Focus KW - Topic KW - Information structure KW - Intervention effects KW - Cyclic linearization KW - A-bar-movement KW - Prosody-syntax interface KW - Accentuation Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-010-9109-x SN - 0167-806X VL - 29 IS - 1 SP - 169 EP - 209 PB - Springer CY - Dordrecht ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Preusse, Franziska A1 - van der Meer, Elke A1 - Deshpande, Gopikrishna A1 - Krüger, Frank A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell T1 - Fluid intelligence allows flexible recruitment of the parieto-frontal network in analogical reasoning JF - Frontiers in human neuroscienc N2 - Fluid intelligence is the ability to think flexibly and to understand abstract relations. People with high fluid intelligence (hi-fluIQ) perform better in analogical reasoning tasks than people with average fluid intelligence (ave-fluIQ). Although previous neuroimaging studies reported involvement of parietal and frontal brain regions in geometric analogical reasoning (which is a prototypical task for fluid intelligence), however, neuroimaging findings on geometric analogical reasoning in hi-fluIQ are sparse. Furthermore, evidence on the relation between brain activation and intelligence while solving cognitive tasks is contradictory. The present study was designed to elucidate the cerebral correlates of geometric analogical reasoning in a sample of hi-fluIQ and ave-fluIQ high school students. We employed a geometric analogical reasoning task with graded levels of task difficulty and confirmed the involvement of the parieto-frontal network in solving this task. In addition to characterizing the brain regions involved in geometric analogical reasoning in hi-fluIQ and ave-fluIQ, we found that blood oxygenation level dependency (BOLD) signal changes were greater for hi-fluIQ than for ave-fluIQ in parietal brain regions. However, ave-fluIQ showed greater BOLD signal changes in the anterior cingulate cortex and medial frontal gyrus than hi-fluIQ. Thus, we showed that a similar network of brain regions is involved in geometric analogical reasoning in both groups. Interestingly, the relation between brain activation and intelligence is not mono-directional, but rather, it is specific for each brain region. The negative brain activation-intelligence relationship in frontal brain regions in hi-fluIQ goes along with a better behavioral performance and reflects a lower demand for executive monitoring compared to ave-fluIQ individuals. In conclusion, our data indicate that flexibly modulating the extent of regional cerebral activity is characteristic for fluid intelligence. KW - high fluid intelligence KW - geometric analogical reasoning KW - task difficulty KW - functional magnetic resonance imaging KW - parieto-frontal network Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00022 SN - 1662-5161 VL - 5 IS - 3 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Brunner, Jana A1 - Fuchs, Susanne A1 - Perrier, Pascal T1 - Supralaryngeal control in Korean velar stops JF - Journal of phonetics N2 - The aim of this study was to investigate the supralaryngeal control of the production of the Korean three-way contrast in velar stops. First, an EMA-experiment with three Korean speakers was carried out, and the kinematic properties of the tongue back were analyzed (length of the deceleration phase of the movement, peak velocity, peak acceleration, amplitude and duration of the looping movement during consonantal closure, and angle of incidence between tongue and palate at contact onset). To understand the potential motor control mechanisms underlying the production of the three-way contrast, the target hypothesis, which suggests that articulator movements in stops are directed towards a target at or beyond the palate, was evaluated by comparing its predictions with our experimental findings. Evidence was found in support of this hypothesis. Hence, the hypothesis was further explored in a modeling study. The results suggest that variability in the articulatory parameters can be explained by a single control parameter, namely the target position of the tongue. In a third step the Korean velar stops were simulated by varying the target position. The results show that the main trends of the simulated consonants are in good agreement with the experimental findings. Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2011.01.003 SN - 0095-4470 VL - 39 IS - 2 SP - 178 EP - 195 PB - Elsevier CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Drenhaus, Heiner A1 - Zimmermann, Malte A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Exhaustiveness effects in clefts are not truth-functional JF - Journal of neurolinguistics : an international journal for the study of brain function in language behavior and experience N2 - While it is widely acknowledged in the formal semantic literature that both the truth-functional focus particle only and it-clefts convey exhaustiveness, the nature and source of exhaustiveness effects with it-clefts remain contested. We describe a questionnaire study (n = 80) and an event-related brain potentials (ERP) study (n = 16) that investigated the violation of exhaustiveness in German only-foci versus it-clefts. The offline study showed that a violation of exhaustivity with only is less acceptable than the violation with it-clefts, suggesting a difference in the nature of exhaustivity interpretation in the two environments. The ERP-results confirm that this difference can be seen in online processing as well: a violation of exhaustiveness in only-foci elicited a centro-posterior positivity (600-800ms), whereas a violation in it-clefts induced a globally distributed N400 pattern (400-600ms). The positivity can be interpreted as a reanalysis process and more generally as a process of context updating. The N400 effect in it-clefts is interpreted as indexing a cancelation process that is functionally distinct from the only case. The ERP study is, to our knowledge, the first evidence from an online experimental paradigm which shows that the violation of exhaustiveness involves different underlying processes in the two structural environments. KW - ERP KW - It- clefts KW - Only-foci KW - Information structure KW - German Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2010.10.004 SN - 0911-6044 VL - 24 IS - 3 SP - 320 EP - 337 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Taboada, Maite A1 - Brooke, Julian A1 - Tofiloski, Milan A1 - Voll, Kimberly A1 - Stede, Manfred T1 - Lexicon-Based methods for sentiment analysis JF - Computational linguistics N2 - We present a lexicon-based approach to extracting sentiment from text. The Semantic Orientation CALculator (SO-CAL) uses dictionaries of words annotated with their semantic orientation (polarity and strength), and incorporates intensification and negation. SO-CAL is applied to the polarity classification task, the process of assigning a positive or negative label to a text that captures the text's opinion towards its main subject matter. We show that SO-CAL's performance is consistent across domains and on completely unseen data. Additionally, we describe the process of dictionary creation, and our use of Mechanical Turk to check dictionaries for consistency and reliability. Y1 - 2011 SN - 0891-2017 VL - 37 IS - 2 SP - 267 EP - 307 PB - MIT Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Brunner, Jana A1 - Ghosh, Satrajit A1 - Hoole, Philip A1 - Matthies, Melanie A1 - Tiede, Mark A1 - Perkell, Joseph T1 - The influence of auditory acuity on acoustic variability and the use of motor equivalence during adaptation to a perturbation JF - Journal of speech, language, and hearing research N2 - Purpose: The aim of this study was to relate speakers' auditory acuity for the sibilant contrast, their use of motor equivalent trading relationships in producing the sibilant /integral/, and their produced acoustic distance between the sibilants /s/ and /integral/. Specifically, the study tested the hypotheses that during adaptation to a perturbation of vocal-tract shape, high-acuity speakers use motor equivalence strategies to a greater extent than do low-acuity speakers in order to reach their smaller phonemic goal regions, and that high-acuity speakers produce greater acoustic distance between 2 sibilant phonemes than do low-acuity speakers. Method: Articulographic data from 7 German speakers adapting to a perturbation were analyzed for the use of motor equivalence. The speakers' produced acoustic distance between /s/ and /integral/ was calculated. Auditory acuity was assessed for the same speakers. Results: High-acuity speakers used motor equivalence to a greater extent when adapting to a perturbation than did low-acuity speakers. Additionally, high-acuity speakers produced greater acoustic contrasts than did low-acuity-speakers. It was observed that speech rate had an influence on the use of motor equivalence: Slow speakers used motor equivalence to a lesser degree than did fast speakers. Conclusion: These results provide support for the mutual interdependence of speech perception and production. KW - articulation KW - palate KW - speech sound KW - speech intelligibility Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2010/09-0256) SN - 1092-4388 VL - 54 IS - 3 SP - 727 EP - 739 PB - American Speech-Language-Hearing Assoc. CY - Rockville ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Tsegaye, Mulugeta Tarekegne A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Iribarren, Carolina T1 - The effect of literacy on oral language processing implications for aphasia tests JF - Clinical linguistics & phonetics N2 - Most studies investigating the impact of literacy on oral language processing have shown that literacy provides phonological awareness skills in the processing of oral language. The implications of these results on aphasia tests could be significant and pose questions on the adequacy of such tools for testing non-literate individuals. Aiming at examining the impact of literacy on oral language processing and its implication on aphasia tests, this study tested 12 non-literate and 12 literate individuals with a modified Amharic version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (Paradis and Amberber, 1991, Bilingual Aphasia Test. Amharic version. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.). The problems of phonological awareness skills in oral language processing in non-literates are substantiated. In addition, compared with literate participants, non-literate individuals demonstrated difficulties in the word/sentence-picture matching tasks. This study has also revealed that the Amharic version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test may be viable for testing Amharic-speaking non-literate individuals with aphasia when modifications are incorporated. KW - aphasia KW - Bilingual Aphasia Test KW - literacy KW - Amharic KW - phonological awareness KW - word/sentence-picture matching Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3109/02699206.2011.567348 SN - 0269-9206 VL - 25 IS - 6-7 SP - 628 EP - 639 PB - Taylor & Francis Group CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Weskott, Thomas A1 - Fanselow, Gisbert T1 - On the informativity of different measures of linguistic acceptability JF - Language : journal of the Linguistic Society of America N2 - This article deals with the claim that the MAGNITUDE ESTIMATION (ME) method of gathering acceptability judgments produces data that are more informative for linguists than binary or n-point scale judgments. We performed three acceptability-rating experiments that directly compared ME data to binary and seven-point scale data. The results clearly falsify the hypothesis that data gathered by the ME method carry a larger amount of information about the acceptability of a given linguistic phenomenon. The three measures are largely equivalent with respect to informativity. Moreover, ME judgments are shown to be more liable to producing spurious variance under certain circumstances.* KW - acceptability judgments KW - empirical syntax KW - magnitude estimation KW - informativity Y1 - 2011 SN - 0097-8507 VL - 87 IS - 2 SP - 249 EP - 273 PB - Linguistic Society of America CY - Washington ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Rossi, Sonja A1 - Jürgenson, Ina B. A1 - Hanulikova, Adriana A1 - Telkemeyer, Silke A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Obrig, Hellmuth T1 - Implicit processing of phonotactic cues evidence from electrophysiological and vascular responses JF - Journal of cognitive neuroscience N2 - Spoken word recognition is achieved via competition between activated lexical candidates that match the incoming speech input. The competition is modulated by prelexical cues that are important for segmenting the auditory speech stream into linguistic units. One such prelexical cue that listeners rely on in spoken word recognition is phonotactics. Phonotactics defines possible combinations of phonemes within syllables or words in a given language. The present study aimed at investigating both temporal and topographical aspects of the neuronal correlates of phonotactic processing by simultaneously applying ERPs and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Pseudowords, either phonotactically legal or illegal with respect to the participants' native language, were acoustically presented to passively listening adult native German speakers. ERPs showed a larger N400 effect for phonotactically legal compared to illegal pseudowords, suggesting stronger lexical activation mechanisms in phonotactically legal material. fNIRS revealed a left hemispheric network including fronto-temporal regions with greater response to phonotactically legal pseudowords than to illegal pseudowords. This confirms earlier hypotheses on a left hemispheric dominance of phonotactic processing most likely due to the fact that phonotactics is related to phonological processing and represents a segmental feature of language comprehension. These segmental linguistic properties of a stimulus are predominantly processed in the left hemisphere. Thus, our study provides first insights into temporal and topographical characteristics of phonotactic processing mechanisms in a passive listening task. Differential brain responses between known and unknown phonotactic rules thus supply evidence for an implicit use of phonotactic cues to guide lexical activation mechanisms. Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2010.21547 SN - 0898-929X VL - 23 IS - 7 SP - 1752 EP - 1764 PB - MIT Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - What is the scanpath signature of syntactic reanalysis? JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - Which repair strategy does the language system deploy when it gets garden-pathed, and what can regressive eye movements in reading tell us about reanalysis strategies? Several influential eye-tracking studies on syntactic reanalysis (Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Meseguer, Carreiras, & Clifton, 2002; Mitchell, Shen, Green, & Hodgson, 2008) have addressed this question by examining scanpaths, i.e., sequential patterns of eye fixations. However, in the absence of a suitable method for analyzing scanpaths, these studies relied on simplified dependent measures that are arguably ambiguous and hard to interpret. We address the theoretical question of repair strategy by developing a new method that quantifies scanpath similarity. Our method reveals several distinct fixation strategies associated with reanalysis that went undetected in a previously published data set (Meseguer et al., 2002). One prevalent pattern suggests re-parsing of the sentence, a strategy that has been discussed in the literature (Frazier & Rayner, 1982); however, readers differed tremendously in how they orchestrated the various fixation strategies. Our results suggest that the human parsing system non-deterministically adopts different strategies when confronted with the disambiguating material in garden-path sentences. KW - Reading KW - Syntactic reanalysis KW - Eye movements KW - Parsing KW - Individual differences KW - Scanpaths Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2011.02.004 SN - 0749-596X VL - 65 IS - 2 SP - 109 EP - 127 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Brunner, Jana A1 - Hoole, Phil A1 - Perrier, Pascal T1 - Adaptation strategies in perturbed /s/ JF - Clinical linguistics & phonetics N2 - The purpose of this work is to investigate the role of three articulatory parameters (tongue position, jaw position and tongue grooving) in the production of /s/. Six normal speakers' speech was perturbed by a palatal prosthesis. The fricative was recorded acoustically and through electromagnetic articulography in four conditions: (1) unperturbed, (2) perturbed with auditory feedback masked, (3) perturbed with auditory feedback available and (4) perturbed after a 2-week adaptation period. At the end of the adaptation, speakers produced more high-frequency noise while either having a higher jaw position or more grooving of the tongue or both. We discuss the potential clinical implications of the results with regard to the role of jaw height and tongue grooving in the treatment of impaired /s/. KW - sibilant KW - fricative KW - perturbation KW - prosthesis KW - tongue grooving KW - jaw Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3109/02699206.2011.553699 SN - 0269-9206 VL - 25 IS - 8 SP - 705 EP - 724 PB - Taylor & Francis Group CY - London ER -