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 -
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 - Arantzeta, Miren
A1 - Webster, Janet
A1 - Laka, Itziar
A1 - Martinez-Zabaleta, Maite
A1 - Howard, David
T1 - What happens when they think they are right?
BT - Error awareness analysis of sentence comprehension deficits in aphasia
JF - Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal
N2 - Background: Comprehension of non-canonical sentences is frequently characterised by chance level performance in people with aphasia (PWA). Chance level performance has been interpreted as guessing, but online data does not support this rendering. It is still not clear whether the incorrect sentence processing is guided by the compensatory strategies that PWA might employ to overcome linguistic difficulties.Aims: We aim to study to what extent people with non-fluent aphasia are aware of their sentence comprehension deficits.Methods & Procedures: This study combined offline and online data to investigate the effect of word order and error-awareness on sentence comprehension in a group of PWA and non-brain damaged (NBD) participants. The offline tasks involved auditory sentence picture-matching immediately followed by a confidence rating (CR). Participants were asked to judge the perceived correctness of their previous answer. Online data consisted of eye-tracking.Outcomes & Results: Replicating previous findings, PWA had significantly worse comprehension of Theme-Agent order compared to Agent-Theme order sentences. Controls showed ceiling level sentence comprehension. CR was a poor predictor of response accuracy in PWA, but moderate-good in NBD. A total of 6.8% of judgements were classified as guessing by PWA. Post hoc gaze data analysis indicated that CR was a predictor of the fixation pattern during the presentation of the linguistic stimuli.Conclusions: Results suggest that PWA were mostly unaware of their sentence comprehension errors and did not consciously employ strategies to compensate for their difficulties.
KW - Aphasia
KW - sentence comprehension
KW - error awareness
KW - eye-tracking
KW - anosognosia
Y1 - 2018
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2017.1423270
SN - 0268-7038
SN - 1464-5041
VL - 32
IS - 12
SP - 1418
EP - 1444
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - Abingdon
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Blaszczak, Joanna
T1 - What do bagels and Polish kolwiek-pronouns have in common?
Y1 - 2002
SN - 0-914203-63-0
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris
A1 - Elbuy, Shereen
A1 - Madec, Sylvain
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - What did we learn from forty years of research on semantic interference?
BT - a Bayesian meta-analysis
JF - Journal of memory and language
N2 - When participants in an experiment have to name pictures while ignoring distractor words superimposed on the picture or presented auditorily (i.e., picture-word interference paradigm), they take more time when the word to be named (or target) and distractor words are from the same semantic category (e.g., cat-dog). This experimental effect is known as the semantic interference effect, and is probably one of the most studied in the language production literature. The functional origin of the effect and the exact conditions in which it occurs are however still debated. Since Lupker (1979) reported the effect in the first response time experiment about 40 years ago, more than 300 similar experiments have been conducted. The semantic interference effect was replicated in many experiments, but several studies also reported the absence of an effect in a subset of experimental conditions. The aim of the present study is to provide a comprehensive theoretical review of the existing evidence to date and several Bayesian meta-analyses and meta-regressions to determine the size of the effect and explore the experimental conditions in which the effect surfaces. The results are discussed in the light of current debates about the functional origin of the semantic interference effect and its implications for our understanding of the language production system.
KW - Bayesian random effects meta-analysis
KW - picture-word interference
KW - semantic interference
KW - language production
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104125
SN - 0749-596X
SN - 1096-0821
VL - 114
PB - Elsevier
CY - San Diego
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Brandt-Kobele, Oda-Christina
A1 - Höhle, Barbara
T1 - What asymmetries within comprehension reveal about asymmetries between comprehension and production : the case of verb inflection in language acquisition
N2 - Two recent studies (Johnson et al., 2005; Perez-Leroux, 2006) found that English- and Spanish-learning children do not show the ability to use verb inflection as a cue to subject number before the age of 5 to 6 years. These findings suggest an asymmetric development as verb inflections are usually correctly produced before this age. In the present study we investigated whether German 3- to 4-year-olds take advantage of the information provided by the verb inflection in sentence comprehension. In a first study, children's looking behavior at two pictures was measured after presentation of a sentence in which the subject number was coded only by the verb inflection. The results from this study suggest that children's looks reflect correct interpretation of the sentences and thus show their ability to make use of verb inflection. In a second experiment, preferential looking was combined with an additional task in which the children had to point to the matching picture. in this case children did not perform above chance level. Our results underline the relevance that specific task demands have on the performance of children in comprehension testing. These have to be accounted for when interpreting findings on production and comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition.
Y1 - 2010
UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00243841
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2010.02.008
SN - 0024-3841
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen
A1 - Roeper, Thomas
A1 - DeVilliers, Jill
T1 - WH-acquisition in French and German : connections between case, WH- features and unique triggers
Y1 - 1995
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - De Bleser, Ria
T1 - Wernicke's 1903 case pure agraphia : an enigma for classical models of written language processing
Y1 - 1996
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Aldrup, Marit
T1 - Well let me put it uhm the other way around maybe’
BT - Managing students’ trouble displays in the CLIL classroom
JF - Classroom discourse
N2 - This study is concerned with repair practices that a teacher and students employ to restore intersubjectivity when faced with interactional problems in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classroom. Adopting a conversation analytic (CA) approach, it examines the interactional treatment of students’ verbal and embodied trouble displays in a video-recorded, teacher-fronted geography lesson held in English at a German high school. At the same time, it explores to what extent the repair practices employed are fitted to this specific interactional context. The analysis shows that students’ verbal trouble displays often result in extensive repair sequences, whereas students’ embodied trouble displays are usually met with teacher self-repair in the transition space. In this way, the latter are resolved much earlier and more quickly. The study further reveals practices like reformulation and translation to be especially useful for repairing interactional problems in classrooms in which a foreign language is used as the medium of instruction. The findings may be of interest for prospective as well as practicing teachers in that they provide relevant insights into how interactional trouble can be successfully managed in (CLIL) classroom interaction.
KW - Trouble displays
KW - repair
KW - embodiment
KW - classroom interaction
KW - conversation analysis
Y1 - 2019
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2019.1567360
SN - 1946-3014
SN - 1946-3022
VL - 10
IS - 1
SP - 46
EP - 70
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - Abingdon
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Hein, Johannes
A1 - Murphy, Andrew
T1 - VP-nominalization and the Final-over-Final Condition
JF - Linguistic inquiry
N2 - The Final-over-Final Condition has emerged as a robust and explanatory generalization for a wide range of phenomena (Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts 2014, Sheehan et al. 2017).
In this article, we argue that it also holds in another domain, nominalization.
In languages that show overt nominalization of VPs, one word order is routinely unattested, namely, a head-initial VP with a suffixal nominalizer.
This typological gap can be accounted for by the Final-over-Final Condition, if we allow it to hold within mixed extended projections.
This view also makes correct predictions about agentive nominalizations and nominalized serial verb constructions.
KW - Final-over-Final Condition
KW - nominalization
KW - extended projections
KW - word order
KW - serial verb constructions
KW - syntax
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00407
SN - 0024-3892
SN - 1530-9150
VL - 53
IS - 2
SP - 337
EP - 370
PB - MIT Press
CY - Cambridge, Mass.
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Darcy, Isabelle
A1 - Krüger, Franziska
T1 - Vowel perception and production in Turkish children acquiring L2 German
JF - Journal of phonetics
N2 - First language (L1) phonological categories strongly influence late learners' perception and production of second language (L2) categories. For learners who start learning an L2 early in life ("early learners"), this L1 influence appears to be substantially reduced or at least more variable. In this paper, we examine the age at which L1 vowel categories influence the acquisition of L2 vowels. We tested a child population with a very narrow range of age of first exposure, controlling for the use of L1 vs. L2, and various naturally produced contrasts that are not allophonic in the L1 of the children. An oddity discrimination task provided evidence that children who are native speakers of Turkish and began learning German as an L2 in kindergarten categorized difficult German contrasts differently from age-matched native speakers. Their vowel productions of these same contrasts (un-cued object naming) were mostly target-like.
Y1 - 2012
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2012.05.001
SN - 0095-4470
VL - 40
IS - 4
SP - 568
EP - 581
PB - Elsevier
CY - London
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 - Thom, Linda
T1 - Virality and Emotionality of the Lügenpresse Phenomenon: A Critical
Discourse Analysis of German and French Right-Wing Websites
JF - Virality and morphogenesis of right-wing internet populism
Y1 - 2018
SN - 978-3-631-76995-9
SP - 57
EP - 67
PB - Lang
CY - Berlin ; Bern ; Wien
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Kimminich, Eva
T1 - Viral Information - The Shift of Meaning and Politics: An Introduction
to a Multi-Perspective Analysis of Internet Activities
JF - Virality and morphogenesis of right-wing internet populism
Y1 - 2018
SN - 978-3-631-76995-9
SP - 9
EP - 28
PB - Lang
CY - Berlin ; Bern ; Wien
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Féry, Caroline
A1 - Arnhold, Anja
T1 - Verum focus and negation
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-opus4-432356
SN - 978-3-86956-457-9
SP - 213
EP - 229
PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam
CY - Potsdam
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Wiese, Heike
A1 - Oncu, Mehmet Tahir
A1 - Bracker, Philip
T1 - Verb-third-position in Turkish-German Language Contact
BT - Information-structured Linearization of singular and multilingual Speakers
JF - Deutsche Sprache : ds ; Zeitschrift für Theorie, Praxis, Dokumentation
N2 - In present-day German we find new word order options, particularly well-known from Turkish-German bilingual speakers in the contexts of new urban dialects, which allow violations of the canonical verb-second position in independent declarative clauses. In these cases, two positions are occupied in the forefield in front of the finite verb, usually by an adverbial and a subject, which identify, at the level of information structure, frame-setter and topic, respectively. Our study investigates the influence of verbal versus language -independent information-structural preferences for this linearisation, comparing Turkish-German multilingual speakers who have grown up in Germany with monolingual German and Turkish speakers. For tasks, in which grammatical restrictions were largely minimised, the results indicate a general tendency to place verbs in a position after the frame-setter and the topic; in addition, we found language-specific influences that distinguish Turkish-German and monolingual German speakers from monolingual Turkish ones. We interpret this as evidence for an information-structural motivation for verb-third, and for a clear dominance of German for Turkish-German speakers in Germany.
Y1 - 2017
SN - 0340-9341
SN - 1866-5233
VL - 45
IS - 1
SP - 31
EP - 52
PB - Erich Schmidt
CY - Berlin
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Hein, Johannes
T1 - Verb movement and the lack of verb-doubling VP topicalization in Germanic
JF - The journal of comparative Germanic linguistics
N2 - In the absence of a stranded auxiliary or modal, VP-topicalization in most Germanic languages gives rise to the presence of a dummy verb meaning 'do'. Cross-linguistically, this is a rather uncommon strategy as comparable VP-fronting constructions in other languages, e.g. Hebrew, Polish, and Portuguese, among many others, exhibit verb doubling. A comparison of several recent approaches to verb doubling in VP-fronting reveals that it is the consequence of VP-evacuating head movement of the verb to some higher functional head, which saves the (low copy of the) verb from undergoing copy deletion as part of the low VP copy in the VP-topicalization dependency. Given that almost all Germanic languages have such V-salvaging head movement, namely V-to-C movement, but do not show verb doubling, this paper suggests that V-raising is exceptionally impossible in VP-topicalization clauses and addresses the question of why it is blocked. After discussing and rejecting some conceivable explanations for the lack of verb doubling, I propose that the blocking effect arises from a bleeding interaction between V-to-C movement and VP-to-SpecCP movement. As both operations are triggered by the same head, i.e. C, the VP is always encountered first by a downward search algorithm. Movement of VP then freezes it and its lower copies for subextraction precluding subsequent V-raising. Crucially, this implies that there is no V-to-T raising in most Germanic languages. V2 languages with V-to-T raising, e.g. Yiddish, are correctly predicted to not exhibit the blocking effect.
KW - Verb doubling
KW - Head movement
KW - VP-topicalization
KW - Copy deletion
KW - V-to-T
KW - movement
KW - V-to-C movement
KW - Verb second
KW - Freezing
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-021-09125-5
SN - 1383-4924
SN - 1572-8552
VL - 24
IS - 1
SP - 89
EP - 144
PB - Springer Science + Business Media B.V.
CY - Dordrecht
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen
A1 - Vicente, Luis
T1 - Verb doubling in Mandarin Chinese
JF - Journal of East Asian linguistics
N2 - This article examines two so-far-understudied verb doubling constructions in Mandarin Chinese, viz., verb doubling clefts and verb doubling lianaEuro broken vertical bar dou. We show that these constructions have the same internal syntax as regular clefts and lianaEuro broken vertical bar dou sentences, the doubling effect being epiphenomenal; therefore, we classify them as subtypes of the general cleft and lianaEuro broken vertical bar dou constructions, respectively, rather than as independent constructions. Additionally, we also show that, as in many other languages with comparable constructions, the two instances of the verb are part of a single movement chain, which has the peculiarity of allowing Spell-Out of more than one link.
KW - Mandarin Chinese
KW - Verb doubling
KW - Verb movement
KW - Cleft
KW - lian ... dou
Y1 - 2013
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-012-9095-6
SN - 0925-8558
VL - 22
IS - 1
SP - 1
EP - 37
PB - Springer
CY - Dordrecht
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Kohnen, Saskia
A1 - Nickels, Lyndsey
A1 - Geigis, Leonie
A1 - Coltheart, Max
A1 - McArthur, Genevieve
A1 - Castles, Anne
T1 - Variations within a subtype
BT - Developmental surface dyslexias in English
JF - Cortex : a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behaviour
N2 - Surface dyslexia is characterised by poor reading of irregular words while nonword reading can be completely normal. Previous work has identified several theoretical possibilities for the underlying locus of impairment in surface dyslexia. In this study, we systematically investigated whether children with surface dyslexia showed different patterns of reading performance that could be traced back to different underlying levels of impairment. To do this, we tested 12 English readers, replicating previous work in Hebrew (Gvion & Friedmann, 2013; 2016; Friedmann & Lukov, 2008; Friedmann & Gvion, 2016). In our sample, we found that poor irregular word reading was associated with deficits at the level of the orthographic input lexicon and with impaired access to meaning and spoken word forms after processing written words in the orthographic input lexicon. There were also children whose surface dyslexia seemed to be caused by impairments of the phonological output lexicon. We suggest that further evidence is required to unequivocally support a fourth pattern where the link between orthography and meaning is intact while the link between orthography and spoken word forms is not functioning. All patterns found were consistent with dual route theory while possible patterns of results, which would be inconsistent with dual route theory, were not detected. Crown Copyright (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
KW - Reading difficulties
KW - Proximal causes
KW - Dissociations
KW - Development
Y1 - 2018
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.04.008
SN - 0010-9452
SN - 1973-8102
VL - 106
SP - 151
EP - 163
PB - Elsevier
CY - Paris
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris
T1 - Variation in the speech signal as a window into the cognitive architecture of language production
JF - Psychonomic bulletin & review : a journal of the Psychonomic Society
N2 - The pronunciation of words is highly variable. This variation provides crucial information about the cognitive architecture of the language production system. This review summarizes key empirical findings about variation phenomena, integrating corpus, acoustic, articulatory, and chronometric data from phonetic and psycholinguistic studies. It examines how these data constrain our current understanding of word production processes and highlights major challenges and open issues that should be addressed in future research.
KW - Language production
KW - Variation
KW - Psycholinguistic models
KW - Phonology
KW - Phonetics
Y1 - 2018
U6 - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-017-1423-4
SN - 1069-9384
SN - 1531-5320
VL - 25
IS - 6
SP - 1973
EP - 2004
PB - Springer
CY - New York
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Salzmann, Martin
T1 - Variation in resumption requires violable constraints
BT - a case study in Alemannic relativization
JF - Linguistics in Potsdam
N2 - Variation in dative resumption among and within Alemannic varieties of German strongly favors an Evaluator component that makes use of optimality-theoretic evaluation rather than filters as in the Minimalist Program (MP). At the same time, the variation is restricted to realizational requirements. This supports a model of syntax like the Derivations and Evaluations framework (Broekhuis 2008) that combines a restrictive MP-style Generator with an Evaluator that includes ranked violable (interface) constraints.
KW - resumption
KW - Swiss German
KW - variation
KW - evaluator
KW - Reference Set
KW - Candidate Set
KW - dative
KW - constraints
KW - oblique case
KW - relative clauses
Y1 - 2009
U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-32251
SN - 1616-7392
SN - 1864-1857
IS - 28
SP - 99
EP - 132
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 - Verissimo, Joao Marques
A1 - Clahsen, Harald
T1 - Variables and similarity in linguistic generalization: Evidence from inflectional classes in Portuguese
JF - Journal of memory and language
N2 - Two opposing viewpoints have been advanced to account for morphological productivity, one according to which some knowledge is couched in the form of operations over variables, and another in which morphological generalization is primarily determined by similarity. We investigated this controversy by examining the generalization of Portuguese verb stems, which fall into one of three conjugation classes. In Study 1, an elicited production task revealed that the generalization of 2nd and 3rd conjugation stems is influenced by the degree of phonological similarity between novel roots and existing verbs, whereas the 1st conjugation generalizes beyond similarity. In Study 2, we directly contrasted two distinct computational implementations of conjugation class assignment in how well they matched the human data: a similarity-driven model that captures phonological similarities, and a dual-mechanism model that implements an explicit distinction between context-free and similarity-based generalizations. The similarity-driven model consistently underestimated 1st conjugation responses and overestimated proportions of 2nd and 3rd conjugation responses, especially for novel verbs that are highly similar to existing verbs of those classes. In contrast, the expected proportions produced by the dual-mechanism model were statistically indistinguishable from human responses. We conclude that both context-free and context-sensitive processes determine the generalization of conjugations in Portuguese, and that similarity-based algorithms of morphological acquisition are insufficient to exhibit default-like generalization. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
KW - Variables
KW - Similarity
KW - Rules
KW - Morphological generalization
KW - Productivity
KW - Computational modeling
Y1 - 2014
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2014.06.001
SN - 0749-596X
SN - 1096-0821
VL - 76
SP - 61
EP - 79
PB - Elsevier
CY - San Diego
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Saddy, Douglas
T1 - Variables and events in the syntax of agrammatic speech
Y1 - 1995
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Cunnings, Ian
A1 - Patterson, Clare
A1 - Felser, Claudia
T1 - Variable binding and coreference in sentence comprehension: Evidence from eye movements
JF - Journal of memory and language
KW - Pronoun resolution
KW - Eye movements
KW - Reading
KW - Memory retrieval
Y1 - 2014
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2013.10.001
SN - 0749-596X
SN - 1096-0821
VL - 71
SP - 39
EP - 56
PB - Elsevier
CY - San Diego
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Pregla, Dorothea
A1 - Lissón Hernández, Paula J.
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
A1 - Burchert, Frank
A1 - Stadie, Nicole
T1 - Variability in sentence comprehension in aphasia in German
JF - Brain & language : a journal of the neurobiology of language
N2 - An important aspect of aphasia is the observation of behavioral variability between and within individual participants. Our study addresses variability in sentence comprehension in German, by testing 21 individuals with aphasia and a control group and involving (a) several constructions (declarative sentences, relative clauses and control structures with an overt pronoun or PRO), (b) three response tasks (object manipulation, sentence-picture matching with/without self-paced listening), and (c) two test phases (to investigate test-retest performance). With this systematic, large-scale study we gained insights into variability in sentence comprehension. We found that the size of syntactic effects varied both in aphasia and in control participants. Whereas variability in control participants led to systematic changes, variability in individuals with aphasia was unsystematic across test phases or response tasks. The persistent occurrence of canonicity and interference effects across response tasks and test phases, however, shows that the performance is systematically influenced by syntactic complexity.
KW - Aphasia
KW - Sentence Comprehension
KW - Variability
KW - Test-retest reliability
KW - Task demands
KW - Canonicity and interference effects
KW - Object manipulation
KW - Sentence-picture matching
KW - Self-paced listening
KW - Adaptation
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bl.2021.105008
SN - 0093-934X
SN - 1090-2155
VL - 222
PB - Elsevier
CY - Amsterdam
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Höhle, Barbara
A1 - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka
A1 - Nazzi, Thierry
T1 - Variability and stability in early language acquisition
BT - comparing recognition and bilingual infants' speech perception and word recognition
JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition
N2 - Many human infants grow up learning more than one language simultaneously but only recently has research started to study early language acquisition in this population more systematically. The paper gives an overview on findings on early language acquisition in bilingual infants during the first two years of life and compares these findings to current knowledge on early language acquisition in monolingual infants. Given the state of the research, the overview focuses on research on phonological and early lexical development in the first two years of life. We will show that the developmental trajectory of early language acquisition in these areas is very similar in mono- and bilingual infants suggesting that these early steps into language are guided by mechanisms that are rather robust against the differences in the conditions of language exposure that mono- and bilingual infants typically experience.
KW - language acquisition
KW - bilingual infants
KW - bilingual phonological
KW - development
KW - bilingual lexical development
KW - simultaneous bilingualism
Y1 - 2019
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000348
SN - 1366-7289
SN - 1469-1841
VL - 23
IS - 1
SP - 56
EP - 71
PB - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY - New York
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Clahsen, Harald
A1 - Jessen, Anna
T1 - Variability and its limits in bilingual word recognition
BT - a morphological priming study
JF - The mental lexicon
N2 - This study examines the processing of morphologically complex words focusing on how morphological (in addition to orthographic and semantic) factors affect bilingual word recognition. We report findings from a large experimental study with groups of bilingual (Turkish/German) speakers using the visual masked-priming technique. We found morphologically mediated effects on the response speed and the inter-individual variability within the bilingual participant group. We conclude that the grammar (qua morphological parsing) not only enhances speed of processing in bilingual language processing but also yields more uniform performance and thereby constrains variability within a group of otherwise heterogeneous individuals.
KW - German
KW - inflection
KW - morphology
KW - L2 processing
KW - masked priming
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.20013.cla
SN - 1871-1340
SN - 1871-1375
VL - 15
IS - 2
SP - 295
EP - 329
PB - John Benjamins Publishing Co.
CY - Amsterdam
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Ciaccio, Laura Anna
A1 - Clahsen, Harald
T1 - Variability and consistency in first and second language processing
BT - A masked morphological priming study on prefixation and suffixation
JF - Language Learning
N2 - Word forms such as walked or walker are decomposed into their morphological constituents (walk + -ed/-er) during language comprehension. Yet, the efficiency of morphological decomposition seems to vary for different languages and morphological types, as well as for first and second language speakers. The current study reports results from a visual masked priming experiment focusing on different types of derived word forms (specifically prefixed vs. suffixed) in first and second language speakers of German. We compared the present findings with results from previous studies on inflection and compounding and proposed an account of morphological decomposition that captures both the variability and the consistency of morphological decomposition for different morphological types and for first and second language speakers. Open Practices This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. Study materials are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at . Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: .
KW - prefixed words
KW - derivation
KW - second language processing
KW - masked priming
KW - morphology
Y1 - 2019
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12370
SN - 0023-8333
SN - 1467-9922
VL - 70
IS - 1
SP - 103
EP - 136
PB - Wiley
CY - Hoboken
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Alxatib, Sam
A1 - Sauerland, Ulrich
T1 - Vagueness
JF - The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics
N2 - Though vague phenomena have been studied extensively for many decades, it is only in recent years that researchers sought the support of quantitative data. This chapter highlights and discusses the insights that experimental methods brought to the study of vagueness. One area focused on are ‘borderline contradictions’, that is, sentences like ‘She is neither tall nor not tall’ that are contradictory when analysed in classical logic, but are actually acceptable as descriptions of borderline cases. The flourishing of theories and experimental studies that borderline contradictions have led to are examined closely. Beyond this illustrative case, an overview of recent studies that concern the classification of types of vagueness, the use of numbers, rounding, number modification, and the general pragmatic status of vagueness is provided.
KW - vagueness
KW - gradability
KW - categories
KW - borderline cases
KW - contradiction
KW - valency
KW - imprecision
KW - hysteresis
KW - pragmatics
KW - semantics
Y1 - 2019
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198791768.013.24
PB - Oxford University Press
CY - Oxford
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno
A1 - Roettger, Timo B.
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - Using meta-analysis for evidence synthesis
BT - the case of incomplete neutralization in German
JF - Journal of phonetics
N2 - Within quantitative phonetics, it is common practice to draw conclusions based on statistical significance alone Using incomplete neutralization of final devoicing in German as a case study, we illustrate the problems with this approach. If researchers find a significant acoustic difference between voiceless and devoiced obstruents, they conclude that neutralization is incomplete, and if they find no significant difference, they conclude that neutralization is complete. However, such strong claims regarding the existence or absence of an effect based on significant results alone can be misleading. Instead, the totality of available evidence should be brought to bear on the question. Towards this end, we synthesize the evidence from 14 studies on incomplete neutralization in German using a Bayesian random-effects meta-analysis. Our meta-analysis provides evidence in favor of incomplete neutralization. We conclude with some suggestions for improving the quality of future research on phonetic phenomena: ensure that sample sizes allow for high-precision estimates of the effect; avoid the temptation to deploy researcher degrees of freedom when analyzing data; focus on estimates of the parameter of interest and the uncertainty about that parameter; attempt to replicate effects found; and, whenever possible, make both the data and analysis available publicly. (c) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
KW - Meta-analysis
KW - Incomplete neutralization
KW - Final devoicing
KW - German
KW - Bayesian data analysis
Y1 - 2018
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2018.06.001
SN - 0095-4470
VL - 70
SP - 39
EP - 55
PB - Elsevier
CY - London
ER -