TY - JOUR A1 - Rabe, Maximilian Michael A1 - Chandra, Johan A1 - Krügel, André A1 - Seelig, Stefan A. A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Engbert, Ralf T1 - A bayesian approach to dynamical modeling of eye-movement control in reading of normal, mirrored, and scrambled texts JF - Psychological Review N2 - In eye-movement control during reading, advanced process-oriented models have been developed to reproduce behavioral data. So far, model complexity and large numbers of model parameters prevented rigorous statistical inference and modeling of interindividual differences. Here we propose a Bayesian approach to both problems for one representative computational model of sentence reading (SWIFT; Engbert et al., Psychological Review, 112, 2005, pp. 777-813). We used experimental data from 36 subjects who read the text in a normal and one of four manipulated text layouts (e.g., mirrored and scrambled letters). The SWIFT model was fitted to subjects and experimental conditions individually to investigate between- subject variability. Based on posterior distributions of model parameters, fixation probabilities and durations are reliably recovered from simulated data and reproduced for withheld empirical data, at both the experimental condition and subject levels. A subsequent statistical analysis of model parameters across reading conditions generates model-driven explanations for observable effects between conditions. KW - reading eye movements KW - dynamical models KW - Bayesian inference KW - oculomotor KW - control KW - individual differences Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000268 SN - 0033-295X SN - 1939-1471 VL - 128 IS - 5 SP - 803 EP - 823 PB - American Psychological Association CY - Washington ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Puebla, Cecilia A1 - Garcia, Juan T1 - Advocating the inclusion of older adults in digital language learning technology and research BT - some considerations JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921000742 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 25 IS - 3 SP - 398 EP - 399 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Korochkina, Maria A1 - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris A1 - Nickels, Lyndsey T1 - Apples and oranges BT - how does learning context affect novel word learning? JF - Journal of memory and language : JML N2 - Despite scarce empirical evidence, introducing new vocabulary in semantic categories has long been standard in second language teaching. We examined the effect of learning context on encoding, immediate recall and integration of new vocabulary into semantic memory by contrasting categorically related (novel names for familiar concepts blocked by semantic category) and unrelated (mixed semantic categories) learning contexts. Two learning sessions were conducted 24 hours apart, with each participant exposed to both contexts. Subsequently, a test phase examined picture naming, translation and picture-word interference tasks. Compared to the unrelated context, the categorically related context resulted in poorer naming accuracy in the learning phase, slower response latencies at the immediate recall tasks and greater semantic interference in the picture-word interference task (picture naming in L1 with semantically related novel word distractors). We develop a theoretical account of word learning that attributes observed differences to episodic rather than semantic memory. KW - Word learning KW - Learning context KW - Episodic memory KW - Semantic memory KW - Integration KW - Word production Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2021.104246 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 120 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schreiber, Alexander A1 - Onea Gáspár, Edgar T1 - Are narrow focus exhaustivity inferences Bayesian inferences? JF - Frontiers in psychology / Frontiers Research Foundation N2 - In successful communication, the literal meaning of linguistic utterances is often enriched by pragmatic inferences. Part of the pragmatic reasoning underlying such inferences has been successfully modeled as Bayesian goal recognition in the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In this paper, we try to model the interpretation of question-answer sequences with narrow focus in the answer in the RSA framework, thereby exploring the effects of domain size and prior probabilities on interpretation. Should narrow focus exhaustivity inferences be actually based on Bayesian inference involving prior probabilities of states, RSA models should predict a dependency of exhaustivity on these factors. We present experimental data that suggest that interlocutors do not act according to the predictions of the RSA model and that exhaustivity is in fact approximately constant across different domain sizes and priors. The results constitute a conceptual challenge for Bayesian accounts of the underlying pragmatic inferences. KW - pragmatics KW - Bayesian models KW - rational speech act models KW - implicatures KW - focus KW - exhaustivity Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.677223 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 12 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schäfer, Robin A1 - Stede, Manfred T1 - Argument mining on twitter BT - a survey JF - Information technology : it ; Methoden und innovative Anwendungen der Informatik und Informationstechnik ; Organ der Fachbereiche 3 und 4 der GI e.V. und des Fachbereichs 6 der ITG N2 - In the last decade, the field of argument mining has grown notably. However, only relatively few studies have investigated argumentation in social media and specifically on Twitter. Here, we provide the, to our knowledge, first critical in-depth survey of the state of the art in tweet-based argument mining. We discuss approaches to modelling the structure of arguments in the context of tweet corpus annotation, and we review current progress in the task of detecting argument components and their relations in tweets. We also survey the intersection of argument mining and stance detection, before we conclude with an outlook. KW - Argument Mining KW - Twitter KW - Stance Detection Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/itit-2020-0053 SN - 1611-2776 SN - 2196-7032 VL - 63 IS - 1 SP - 45 EP - 58 PB - De Gruyter CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jeong, Hye-In A1 - van den Hoven, Emiel A1 - Madec, Sylvain A1 - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris T1 - Behavioral and Brain Responses Highlight the Role of Usage in the Preparation of Multiword Utterances for Production JF - Journal of cognitive neuroscience N2 - Usage-based theories assume that all aspects of language processing are shaped by the distributional properties of the language. The frequency not only of words but also of larger chunks plays a major role in language processing. These theories predict that the frequency of phrases influences the time needed to prepare these phrases for production and their acoustic duration. By contrast, dominant psycholinguistic models of utterance production predict no such effects. In these models, the system keeps track of the frequency of individual words but not of co-occurrences. This study investigates the extent to which the frequency of phrases impacts naming latencies and acoustic duration with a balanced design, where the same words are recombined to build high- and low-frequency phrases. The brain signal of participants is recorded so as to obtain information on the electrophysiological bases and functional locus of frequency effects. Forty-seven participants named pictures using high- and low-frequency adjective-noun phrases. Naming latencies were shorter for high-frequency than low-frequency phrases. There was no evidence that phrase frequency impacted acoustic duration. The electrophysiological signal differed between high- and low-frequency phrases in time windows that do not overlap with conceptualization or articulation processes. These findings suggest that phrase frequency influences the preparation of phrases for production, irrespective of the lexical properties of the constituents, and that this effect originates at least partly when speakers access and encode linguistic representations. Moreover, this study provides information on how the brain signal recorded during the preparation of utterances changes with the frequency of word combinations. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01757 SN - 0898-929X SN - 1530-8898 VL - 33 IS - 11 SP - 2231 EP - 2264 PB - MIT Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Krasotkina, Anna A1 - Götz, Antonia A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Schwarzer, Gudrun T1 - Bimodal familiarization re-sensitizes 12-month-old infants to other-race faces JF - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal N2 - Perceptual narrowing in the domain of face perception typically begins to reduce infants' sensitivity to differences distinguishing other-race faces from approximately 6 months of age. The present study investigated whether it is possible to re-sensitize Caucasian 12-month-old infants to other-race Asian faces through statistical learning by familiarizing them with different statistical distributions of these faces. The familiarization faces were created by generating a morphed continuum from one Asian face identity to another. In the unimodal condition, infants were familiarized with a frequency distribution wherein they saw the midpoint face of the morphed continuum the most frequently. In the bimodal condition, infants were familiarized with a frequency distribution wherein they saw faces closer to the endpoints of the morphed continuum the most frequently. After familiarization, infants were tested on their discrimination of the two original Asian faces. The infants' looking times during the test indicated that infants in the bimodal condition could discriminate between the two faces, while infants in the unimodal condition could not. These findings therefore suggest that 12-month-old Caucasian infants could be re-sensitized to Asian faces by familiarizing them with a bimodal frequency distribution of such faces. KW - Bimodal KW - Unimodal KW - Familiarization KW - Statistical learning KW - Infant KW - Face KW - discrimination Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2020.101502 SN - 0163-6383 SN - 1879-0453 VL - 62 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hohaus, Vera A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Comparisons of equality with German so ... wie, and the relationship between degrees and properties JF - Journal of semantics N2 - We present a compositionally transparent, unified semantic analysis of two kinds of so ... wie-equative constructions in German, namely degree equatives and property equatives in the domain of individuals or events. Unlike in English and many other European languages (Haspelmath & Buchholz 1998, Rett 2013), both equative types in German feature the parameter marker so, suggesting a unified analysis. We show that the parallel formal expression of German degree and property equatives is accompanied by a parallel syntactic distribution (in predicative, attributive, and adverbial position), and by identical semantic properties: Both equative types allow for scope ambiguities, show negative island effects out of context, and license the negative polarity item uberhaupt 'at all' in the complement clause. As the same properties are also shared by German comparatives, we adopt the influential quantificational analysis of comparatives in von Stechow (1984ab), Heim (1985, 2001, 2007), and Beck (2011), and treat both German equative types in a uniform manner as expressing universal quantification over sets of degrees or over sets of properties (of individuals or events). Conceptually, the uniform marking of degree-related and property-related meanings is expected given that the abstract semantic category degree (type ) can be reconstructed in terms of equivalence classes, i.e., ontologically simpler sets of individuals (type ) or events (type ). These are found in any language, showing that whether or not a language makes explicit reference to degrees (by means of gradable adjectives, degree question words, degree-only equatives) does not follow on general conceptual or semantic grounds, but is determined by the grammar of that language. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffaa011 SN - 0167-5133 SN - 1477-4593 VL - 38 IS - 1 SP - 95 EP - 143 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Felser, Claudia A1 - Jessen, Anna T1 - Correlative coordination and variable subject-verb agreement in German JF - Languages : open access journal N2 - Coordinated subjects often show variable number agreement with the finite verb, but linguistic approaches to this phenomenon have rarely been informed by systematically collected data. We report the results from three experiments investigating German speakers' agreement preferences with complex subjects joined by the correlative conjunctions sowohl horizontal ellipsis als auch ('both horizontal ellipsis and'), weder horizontal ellipsis noch ('neither horizontal ellipsis nor') or entweder horizontal ellipsis oder ('either horizontal ellipsis or'). We examine to what extent conjunction type and a conjunct's relative proximity to the verb affect the acceptability and processibility of singular vs. plural agreement. Experiment 1 was an untimed acceptability rating task, Experiment 2 a timed sentence completion task, and Experiment 3 was a self-paced reading task. Taken together, our results show that number agreement with correlative coordination in German is primarily determined by a default constraint triggering plural agreement, which interacts with linear order and semantic factors. Semantic differences between conjunctions only affected speakers' agreement preferences in the absence of processing pressure but not their initial agreement computation. The combined results from our offline and online experimental measures of German speakers' agreement preferences suggest that the constraints under investigation do not only differ in their relative weighting but also in their relative timing during agreement computation. KW - correlative coordination KW - subject– verb agreement KW - German Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6020067 SN - 2226-471X VL - 6 IS - 2 PB - MDPI CY - Basel ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Yadav, Himanshu A1 - Husain, Samar A1 - Futrell, Richard T1 - Do dependency lengths explain constraints on crossing dependencies? JF - Linguistics vanguard : multimodal online journal N2 - In syntactic dependency trees, when arcs are drawn from syntactic heads to dependents, they rarely cross. Constraints on these crossing dependencies are critical for determining the syntactic properties of human language, because they define the position of natural language in formal language hierarchies. We study whether the apparent constraints on crossing syntactic dependencies in natural language might be explained by constraints on dependency lengths (the linear distance between heads and dependents). We compare real dependency trees from treebanks of 52 languages against baselines of random trees which are matched with the real trees in terms of their dependency lengths. We find that these baseline trees have many more crossing dependencies than real trees, indicating that a constraint on dependency lengths alone cannot explain the empirical rarity of crossing dependencies. However, we find evidence that a combined constraint on dependency length and the rate of crossing dependencies might be able to explain two of the most-studied formal restrictions on dependency trees: gap degree and well-nestedness. KW - crossing dependencies KW - dependency length KW - dependency treebanks KW - efficiency KW - language processing KW - syntax Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0070 SN - 2199-174X VL - 7 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ; New York, NY ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Frank, Ulrike A1 - Radtke, Julia A1 - Nienstedt, Julie Cläre A1 - Pötter-Nerger, Monika A1 - Schönwald, Beate A1 - Buhmann, Carsten A1 - Gerloff, Christian A1 - Niessen, Almut A1 - Flügel, Till A1 - Koseki, Jana-Christiane A1 - Pflug, Christina T1 - Dysphagia screening in Parkinson's Disease BT - a diagnostic accuracy cross-sectional study investigating the applicability of the Gugging Swallowing Screen (GUSS) JF - Neurogastroenterology and motility N2 - Background Simple water-swallowing screening tools are not predictive of aspiration and dysphagia in patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD). We investigated the diagnostic accuracy of a multi-texture screening tool, the Gugging Swallowing Screen (GUSS) to identify aspiration and dysphagia/penetration in PD patients compared to flexible endoscopic evaluation of swallowing (FEES). Methods Swallowing function was evaluated in 51 PD participants in clinical 'on-medication' state with the GUSS and a FEES examination according to standardized protocols. Inter-rater reliability and convergent validity were determined and GUSS- and FEES-based diet recommendations were compared. Key Results Inter-rater reliability of GUSS ratings was high (r(s) = 0.8; p < 0.001). Aspiration was identified by the GUSS with a sensitivity of 50%, and specificity of 51.35% (PPV 28%, NPV 73%, LR+ 1.03, LR- 0.97), dysphagia/penetration was identified with 72.97% sensitivity and 35.71% specificity (PPV 75%, NPV 33.33%, LR+ 1.14, LR- 0.76). Agreement between GUSS- and FEES-based diet recommendations was low (r(s) = 0.12, p = 0.42) with consistent NPO (Nil per Os) allocation by GUSS and FEES in only one participant. Conclusions and Inferences The multi-texture screening tool GUSS in its current form, although applicable with good inter-rater reliability, does not detect aspiration in PD patients with acceptable accuracy. Modifications of the GUSS parameters "coughing," "voice change" and "delayed swallowing" might enhance validity. The GUSS' diet recommendations overestimate the need for oral intake restriction in PD patients and should be verified by instrumental swallowing examination. KW - aspiration KW - dysphagia KW - FEES KW - Gugging Swallowing Screen KW - Parkinson' s disease Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/nmo.14034 SN - 1350-1925 SN - 1365-2982 VL - 33 IS - 5 PB - Wiley CY - Hoboken ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fuhrmeister, Pamela T1 - Examining group differences in between-participant variability in non-native speech sound learning JF - Attention, perception, & psychophysics : AP&P ; a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc. N2 - Many studies on non-native speech sound learning report a large amount of between-participant variability. This variability allows us to ask interesting questions about non-native speech sound learning, such as whether certain training paradigms give rise to more or less between-participant variability. This study presents a reanalysis of Fuhrmeister and Myers (Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 82(4), 2049-2065, 2020) and tests whether different types of phonetic training lead to group differences in between-participant variability. The original study trained participants on a non-native speech sound contrast in two different phonological (vowel) contexts and tested for differences in means between a group that received blocked training (one vowel context at a time) and interleaved training (vowel contexts were randomized). No statistically significant differences in means were found between the two groups in the original study on a discrimination test (a same-different judgment). However, the current reanalysis tested group differences in between-participant variability and found greater variability in the blocked training group immediately after training because this group had a larger proportion of participants with higher-than-average scores. After a period of offline consolidation, this group difference in variability decreased substantially. This suggests that the type and difficulty of phonetic training (blocked vs. interleaved) may initially give rise to differences in between-participant variability, but offline consolidation may attenuate that variability and have an equalizing effect across participants. This reanalysis supports the view that examining between-participant variability in addition to means when analyzing data can give us a more complete picture of the effects being tested. KW - Non-native speech sound learning KW - Individual differences KW - Heterogeneity KW - of variance Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-021-02311-3 SN - 1943-3921 SN - 1943-393X VL - 83 IS - 5 SP - 1935 EP - 1941 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Parshina, Olga A1 - Laurinavichyute, Anna A1 - Sekerina, Irina A. T1 - Eye-movement benchmarks in heritage language reading JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition N2 - This eye-tracking study establishes basic benchmarks of eye movements during reading in heritage language (HL) by Russian-speaking adults and adolescents of high (n = 21) and low proficiency (n = 27). Heritage speakers (HSs) read sentences in Cyrillic, and their eye movements were compared to those of Russian monolingual skilled adult readers, 8-year-old children and L2 learners. Reading patterns of HSs revealed longer mean fixation durations, lower skipping probabilities, and higher regressive saccade rates than in monolingual adults. High-proficient HSs were more similar to monolingual children, while low-proficient HSs performed on par with L2 learners. Low-proficient HSs differed from high-proficient HSs in exhibiting lower skipping probabilities, higher fixation counts, and larger frequency effects. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the weaker links account of bilingual language processing as well as the divergent attainment theory of HL. KW - bilingualism KW - heritage language KW - reading KW - eye movements KW - Russian KW - children KW - L2 learners Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S136672892000019X SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 24 IS - 1 SP - 69 EP - 82 PB - Cambridge University Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kuberski, Stephan R. A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. T1 - Fitts’ law in tongue movements of repetitive speech JF - Phonetica : international journal of phonetic science N2 - Fitts' law, perhaps the most celebrated law of human motor control, expresses a relation between the kinematic property of speed and the non-kinematic, task-specific property of accuracy. We aimed to assess whether speech movements obey this law using a metronome-driven speech elicitation paradigm with a systematic speech rate control. Specifically, using the paradigm of repetitive speech, we recorded via electromagnetic articulometry speech movement data in sequences of the form /CV.../ from 6 adult speakers. These sequences were spoken at 8 distinct rates ranging from extremely slow to extremely fast. Our results demonstrate, first, that the present paradigm of extensive metronome-driven manipulations satisfies the crucial prerequisites for evaluating Fitts' law in a subset of our elicited rates. Second, we uncover for the first time in speech evidence for Fitts' law at the faster rates and specifically beyond a participant-specific critical rate. We find no evidence for Fitts' law at the slowest metronome rates. Finally, we discuss implications of these results for models of speech. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1159/000501644 SN - 0031-8388 SN - 1423-0321 VL - 78 IS - 1 SP - 3 EP - 27 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Gelman, Andrew T1 - How to embrace variation and accept uncertainty in linguistic and psycholinguistic data analysis JF - Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences N2 - The use of statistical inference in linguistics and related areas like psychology typically involves a binary decision: either reject or accept some null hypothesis using statistical significance testing. When statistical power is low, this frequentist data-analytic approach breaks down: null results are uninformative, and effect size estimates associated with significant results are overestimated. Using an example from psycholinguistics, several alternative approaches are demonstrated for reporting inconsistencies between the data and a theoretical prediction. The key here is to focus on committing to a falsifiable prediction, on quantifying uncertainty statistically, and learning to accept the fact that - in almost all practical data analysis situations - we can only draw uncertain conclusions from data, regardless of whether we manage to obtain statistical significance or not. A focus on uncertainty quantification is likely to lead to fewer excessively bold claims that, on closer investigation, may turn out to be not supported by the data. KW - experimental linguistics KW - statistical data analysis KW - statistical KW - inference KW - uncertainty quantification Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2019-0051 SN - 0024-3949 SN - 1613-396X VL - 59 IS - 5 SP - 1311 EP - 1342 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Perugia, Giulia A1 - Paetzel-Prüsmann, Maike A1 - Alanenpää, Madelene A1 - Castellano, Ginevra T1 - I can see it in your eyes BT - Gaze as an implicit cue of uncanniness and task performance in repeated interactions with robots JF - Frontiers in robotics and AI N2 - Over the past years, extensive research has been dedicated to developing robust platforms and data-driven dialog models to support long-term human-robot interactions. However, little is known about how people's perception of robots and engagement with them develop over time and how these can be accurately assessed through implicit and continuous measurement techniques. In this paper, we explore this by involving participants in three interaction sessions with multiple days of zero exposure in between. Each session consists of a joint task with a robot as well as two short social chats with it before and after the task. We measure participants' gaze patterns with a wearable eye-tracker and gauge their perception of the robot and engagement with it and the joint task using questionnaires. Results disclose that aversion of gaze in a social chat is an indicator of a robot's uncanniness and that the more people gaze at the robot in a joint task, the worse they perform. In contrast with most HRI literature, our results show that gaze toward an object of shared attention, rather than gaze toward a robotic partner, is the most meaningful predictor of engagement in a joint task. Furthermore, the analyses of gaze patterns in repeated interactions disclose that people's mutual gaze in a social chat develops congruently with their perceptions of the robot over time. These are key findings for the HRI community as they entail that gaze behavior can be used as an implicit measure of people's perception of robots in a social chat and of their engagement and task performance in a joint task. KW - perception of robots KW - long-term interaction KW - mutual gaze KW - engagement KW - uncanny valley Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.645956 SN - 2296-9144 VL - 8 PB - Frontiers Media CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hilton, Matthew A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Elsner, Birgit T1 - Kinematic boundary cues modulate 12-month-old infants’ segmentation of action sequences BT - an ERP study JF - Neuropsychologia : an international journal in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience N2 - Human infants can segment action sequences into their constituent actions already during the first year of life. However, work to date has almost exclusively examined the role of infants' conceptual knowledge of actions and their outcomes in driving this segmentation. The present study examined electrophysiological correlates of infants' processing of lower-level perceptual cues that signal a boundary between two actions of an action sequence. Specifically, we tested the effect of kinematic boundary cues (pre-boundary lengthening and pause) on 12-month-old infants' (N = 27) processing of a sequence of three arbitrary actions, performed by an animated figure. Using the Event-Related Potential (ERP) approach, evidence of a positivity following the onset of the boundary cues was found, in line with previous work that has found an ERP positivity (Closure Positive Shift, CPS) related to boundary processing in auditory stimuli and action sequences in adults. Moreover, an ERP negativity (Negative Central, Nc) indicated that infants' encoding of the post-boundary action was modulated by the presence or absence of prior boundary cues. We therefore conclude that 12-month-old infants are sensitive to lower-level perceptual kinematic boundary cues, which can support segmentation of a continuous stream of movement into individual action units. KW - Action segmentation KW - Kinematic boundary processing KW - ERPs KW - Boundary cues Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107916 SN - 0028-3932 SN - 1873-3514 VL - 159 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Brown, J. M. M. A1 - Fanselow, Gisbert A1 - Hall, Rebecca A1 - Kliegl, Reinhold T1 - Middle ratings rise regardless of grammatical construction BT - Testing syntactic variability in a repeated exposure paradigm JF - PLOS ONE / Public Library of Science N2 - People perceive sentences more favourably after hearing or reading them many times. A prominent approach in linguistic theory argues that these types of exposure effects (satiation effects) show direct evidence of a generative approach to linguistic knowledge: only some sentences improve under repeated exposure, and which sentences do improve can be predicted by a model of linguistic competence that yields natural syntactic classes. However, replications of the original findings have been inconsistent, and it remains unclear whether satiation effects can be reliably induced in an experimental setting at all. Here we report four findings regarding satiation effects in wh-questions across German and English. First, the effects pertain to zone of well-formedness rather than syntactic class: all intermediate ratings, including calibrated fillers, increase at the beginning of the experimental session regardless of syntactic construction. Second, though there is satiation, ratings asymptote below maximum acceptability. Third, these effects are consistent across judgments of superiority effects in English and German. Fourth, wh-questions appear to show similar profiles in English and German, despite these languages being traditionally considered to differ strongly in whether they show effects on movement: violations of the superiority condition can be modulated to a similar degree in both languages by manipulating subject-object initiality and animacy congruency of the wh-phrase. We improve on classic satiation methods by distinguishing between two crucial tests, namely whether exposure selectively targets certain grammatical constructions or whether there is a general repeated exposure effect. We conclude that exposure effects can be reliably induced in rating experiments but exposure does not appear to selectively target certain grammatical constructions. Instead, they appear to be a phenomenon of intermediate gradient judgments. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251280 SN - 1932-6203 VL - 16 IS - 5 PB - PLOS CY - San Fransisco ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Paape, Dario A1 - Avetisyan, Serine A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Modeling misretrieval and feature substitution in agreement attraction BT - a computational evaluation JF - Cognitive science N2 - We present computational modeling results based on a self-paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k-fold cross-validation. We find that our data are better accounted for by an encoding-based model of agreement attraction, compared to a retrieval-based model. A novel methodological contribution of our study is the use of comprehension questions with open-ended responses, so that both misinterpretation of the number feature of the subject phrase and misassignment of the thematic subject role of the verb can be investigated at the same time. We find evidence for both types of misinterpretation in our study, sometimes in the same trial. However, the specific error patterns in our data are not fully consistent with any previously proposed model. KW - Agreement attraction KW - Eastern Armenian KW - Self-paced reading KW - Computational modeling Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13019 SN - 0364-0213 SN - 1551-6709 VL - 45 IS - 8 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Malden, Mass. ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Clahsen, Harald A1 - Jessen, Anna T1 - Morphological generalization in bilingual language production BT - age of acquisition determines variability JF - Language acquisition : a journal of developmental linguistics N2 - Morphological variability in bilingual language production is widely attested. Producing inflected words has been found to be less reliable and consistent in bilinguals than in first-language (functionally monolingual) L1 speakers, even for bilingual speakers at advanced proficiency levels. The sources for these differences are not well understood. The current study presents a detailed investigation of morphological generalization processes in bilingual speakers' language production. We examined past participle formation of German using an elicited-production experiment containing nonce verbs with varying degrees of similarity to existing verbs testing a large group of bilingual Turkish/German speakers relative to L1 German speakers. We compared similarity-based lexical extensions with generalizations of morphological rules. The results show that rule-based generalizations are used less often and more variably within the bilingual group than within the L1 group. Our results also show a selective effect of age of acquisition on the bilingual speakers' morphological generalizations. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2021.1910267 SN - 1048-9223 SN - 1532-7817 VL - 28 IS - 4 SP - 370 EP - 386 PB - Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis Group CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Uygun, Serkan A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Morphological processing in heritage speakers BT - a masked priming study on the Turkish aorist JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition N2 - Previous research has shown that heritage speakers struggle with inflectional morphology. 'Limitations of online resources' for processing a non-dominant language has been claimed as one possible reason for these difficulties. To date, however, there is very little experimental evidence on real-time language processing in heritage speakers. Here we report results from a masked priming experiment with 97 bilingual (Turkish/German) heritage speakers and a control group of 40 non-heritage speakers of Turkish examining regular and irregular forms of the Turkish aorist. We found that, for the regular aorist, heritage speakers use the same morphological decomposition mechanism ('affix stripping') as control speakers, whereas for processing irregularly inflected forms they exhibited more variability (i.e., less homogeneous performance) than the control group. Heritage speakers also demonstrated semantic priming effects. At a more general level, these results indicate that heritage speakers draw on multiple sources of information for recognizing morphologically complex words. KW - Turkish KW - morphology KW - aorist KW - priming KW - variability KW - processing Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728920000577 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 24 IS - 3 SP - 415 EP - 426 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lopukhina, Anastasiya A1 - Lopukhin, Konstantin A1 - Laurinavichyute, Anna T1 - Morphosyntactic but not lexical corpus-based probabilities can substitute for cloze probabilities in reading experiments JF - PLOS ONE / Public Library of Science N2 - During reading or listening, people can generate predictions about the lexical and morphosyntactic properties of upcoming input based on available context. Psycholinguistic experiments that study predictability or control for it conventionally rely on a human-based approach and estimate predictability via the cloze task. Our study investigated an alternative corpus-based approach for estimating predictability via language predictability models. We obtained cloze and corpus-based probabilities for all words in 144 Russian sentences, correlated the two measures, and found a strong correlation between them. Importantly, we estimated how much variance in eye movements registered while reading the same sentences was explained by each of the two probabilities and whether the two probabilities explain the same variance. Along with lexical predictability (the activation of a particular word form), we analyzed morphosyntactic predictability (the activation of morphological features of words) and its effect on reading times over and above lexical predictability. We found that for predicting reading times, cloze and corpus-based measures of both lexical and morphosyntactic predictability explained the same amount of variance. However, cloze and corpus-based lexical probabilities both independently contributed to a better model fit, whereas for morphosyntactic probabilities, the contributions of cloze and corpus-based measures were interchangeable. Therefore, morphosyntactic but not lexical corpus-based probabilities can substitute for cloze probabilities in reading experiments. Our results also indicate that in languages with rich inflectional morphology, such as Russian, when people engage in prediction, they are much more successful in predicting isolated morphosyntactic features than predicting the particular lexeme and its full morphosyntactic markup. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246133 SN - 1932-6203 VL - 16 IS - 1 PB - PLoS CY - San Fransisco ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bosch, Sina A1 - De Cesare, Ilaria A1 - Demske, Ulrike A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - New empirical approaches to grammatical variation and change JF - Languages : open access journal Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6030113 SN - 2226-471X VL - 6 IS - 3 PB - MDPI CY - Basel ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Tran, Thuan T1 - Non-canonical word order and temporal reference in Vietnamese JF - Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences N2 - The paper revisits Duffield's (2007) (Duffield, Nigel. 2007. Aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure: Separating tense from assertion. Linguistics 45(4). 765-814) analysis of the correlation between the position of a 'when'-phrase and the temporal reference of a bare sentence in Vietnamese. Bare sentences in Vietnamese, based on (Smith, Carlota S. & Mary S. Erbaugh. 2005. Temporal interpretation in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics 43(4). 713-756), are argued to obtain their temporal interpretation from their aspectual composition, and the default temporal reference: bounded events are located in the past, unbounded events at present. It is shown that the correlation so observed in when-questions is superficial, and is tied to the syntax and semantics of temporal modification and the requirement that temporal adverbials denoting future time is base generated in sentence-initial position, and past time adverbials in sentence-final position. A 'when'-phrase, being temporally underspecified, obtains its temporal value from its base position. However, the correlation between word order and temporal reference in argument wh-questions and declaratives is factual, depending on whether the predicate-argument configuration allows for a telic interpretation or not. To be specific, it is dependent on whether the application of Generic Modification (Snyder, William. 2012. Parameter theory and motion predicates. In Violeta Demonte & Louise McNally (eds.), Telicity, change, and state. Acrosscategorial view of event structure, 279-299. Oxford: Oxford University Press) or accomplishment composition is realized. Canonical declaratives, and argument wh-questions, with telicity inducing material, license GM or accomplishment composition, yielding bounded events, hence past; by contrast, their noncanonical counterparts block GM or accomplishment composition, giving rise to unbounded event descriptions, hence non-past. KW - Vietnamese KW - accomplishment composition KW - temporal reference KW - generic KW - modification KW - temporal modification Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0256 SN - 0024-3949 SN - 1613-396X VL - 59 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 34 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Veaugh-Geiss, Joseph P. T1 - nà-cleft (non-)exhaustivity BT - variability in Akan JF - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics N2 - This paper presents two experimental studies on the exhaustive inference associated with focus-background na-clefts in Akan (among others, Boadi 1974; Duah 2015; Grubic & Renans & Duah 2019; Titov 2019), with a direct comparison to two recent experiments on German es-clefts employing an identical design (De Veaugh-Geiss et al. 2018). Despite the unforeseen response patterns in Akan in the incremental information-retrieval paradigm used, a post-hoc exploratory analysis reveals compelling parallels between the two languages. The results are compatible with a unified approach both (i) cross-linguistically between Akan and German; and (ii) cross-sententially between na-clefts (a na P, 'It is a who did P') and definite pseudoclefts, i.e., definite descriptions with identity statements (Nipa no a P ne a, 'The person who did P is a') (Boadi 1974; Ofori 2011). Participant variability in (non-)exhaustive interpretations is compatible with discourse pragmatic approaches to cleft exhaustivity (Pollard & Yasavul 2016; De Veaugh-Geiss et al. 2018; Titov 2019). KW - Akan KW - nà-clefts KW - definite pseudoclefts KW - exhaustivity KW - experimental studies Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5698 SN - 2397-1835 VL - 6 IS - 1 PB - Open Library of Humanities CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Obituary: Pieter Muysken JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921000249 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 24 IS - 4 SP - 597 EP - 598 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Langus, Alan A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Object individuation and labelling in 6-month-old infants JF - Infant behavior & development N2 - The ability to determine how many objects are involved in physical events is fundamental for reasoning about the world that surrounds us. Previous studies suggest that infants can fail to individuate objects in ambiguous occlusion events until their first birthday and that learning words for the objects may play a crucial role in the development of this ability. The present eye-tracking study tested whether the classical object individuation experiments underestimate young infants’ ability to individuate objects and the role word learning plays in this process. Three groups of 6-month-old infants (N = 72) saw two opaque boxes side by side on the eye-tracker screen so that the content of the boxes was not visible. During a familiarization phase, two visually identical objects emerged sequentially from one box and two visually different objects from the other box. For one group of infants the familiarization was silent (Visual Only condition). For a second group of infants the objects were accompanied with nonsense words so that objects’ shape and linguistic labels indicated the same number of objects in the two boxes (Visual & Language condition). For the third group of infants, objects’ shape and linguistic labels were in conflict (Visual vs. Language condition). Following the familiarization, it was revealed that both boxes contained the same number of objects (e.g. one or two). In the Visual Only condition, infants looked longer to the box with incorrect number of objects at test, showing that they could individuate objects using visual cues alone. In the Visual & Language condition infants showed the same looking pattern. However, in the Visual vs Language condition infants looked longer to the box with incorrect number of objects according to linguistic labels. The results show that infants can individuate objects in a complex object individuation paradigm considerably earlier than previously thought and that linguistic cues enforce their own preference in object individuation. The results are consistent with the idea that when language and visual information are in conflict, language can exert an influence on how young infants reason about the visual world. KW - Object individuation KW - Object labelling KW - Cognitive development KW - Language KW - development Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101627 SN - 0163-6383 SN - 1879-0453 VL - 65 PB - Elsevier CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Vicente, Luis A1 - Barros, Matthew A1 - Messick, Troy A1 - Saab, Andres T1 - On a nonargument for cleft sources in sluicing JF - Linguistic inquiry N2 - On the basis of certain semantic intuitions, Barros (2012) argues that ellipsis does not require structural isomorphism between elided structure and its antecedent. We tackle this claim. Semantic intuitions cannot be a pointer to the analysis of silent structure. We provide empirical evidence that raises the question of to what extent semantic intuitions about plausible articulable syntax must inform one's analysis of silent structure. We conclude that the answer to this question must be crosslinguistically informed. We conjecture that ellipsis introduces ellipsis-specific interpretive mechanisms, so that intuitions about "how the unelided structure would be interpreted" are not empirically relevant. KW - sluicing KW - contextual restriction KW - ellipsis identity KW - inheritance of KW - content Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00390 SN - 0024-3892 SN - 1530-9150 VL - 52 IS - 4 SP - 867 EP - 880 PB - MIT Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bade, Nadine T1 - On the scope and nature of Maximise Presupposition JF - Language and linguistics compass N2 - The paper introduces the principle Maximise Presupposition and its cognates. The main focus of the literature and this article is on the inferences that arise as a result of reasoning with Maximise Presupposition ('anti-presuppositions'). I will review the arguments put forward for distinguishing them from other inference types, most notably presuppositions and conversational implicatures. I will zoom in on three main issues regarding Maximise Presupposition and these inferences critically discussed in the literature: epistemic strength(ening), projection, and the role of alternatives. I will discuss more recent views which argue for either a uniform treatment of anti-presuppositions and implicatures and/or a revision of the original principle in light of new data and developments in pragmatics. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12416 SN - 1749-818X VL - 15 IS - 6 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Krasotkina, Anna A1 - Götz, Antonia A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Schwarzer, Gudrun T1 - Perceptual narrowing in face- and speech-perception domains in infancy BT - a longitudinal approach JF - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal N2 - During the first year of life, infants undergo a process known as perceptual narrowing, which reduces their sensitivity to classes of stimuli which the infants do not encounter in their environment. It has been proposed that perceptual narrowing for faces and speech may be driven by shared domain-general processes. To investigate this theory, our study longitudinally tested 50 German Caucasian infants with respect to these domains first at 6 months of age followed by a second testing at 9 months of age. We used an infant-controlled habituation-dishabituation paradigm to test the infants' ability to discriminate among other-race Asian faces and non-native Cantonese speech tones, as well as same-race Caucasian faces as a control. We found that while at 6 months of age infants could discriminate among all stimuli, by 9 months of age they could no longer discriminate among other-race faces or non-native tones. However, infants could discriminate among same-race stimuli both at 6 and at 9 months of age. These results demonstrate that the same infants undergo perceptual narrowing for both other-race faces and non-native speech tones between the ages of 6 and 9 months. This parallel development of perceptual narrowing occurring in both the face and speech perception modalities over the same period of time lends support to the domain-general theory of perceptual narrowing in face and speech perception. KW - face perception KW - speech perception KW - longitudinal KW - infant KW - perceptual KW - narrowing Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101607 SN - 0163-6383 SN - 1879-0453 VL - 64 PB - Elsevier CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Mokari, Payam Ghaffarvand A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. A1 - Williams, Daniel T1 - Perceptuomotor compatibility effects in vowels BT - effects of consonantal context and acoustic proximity of response and distractor JF - JASA Express Letters N2 - In a cue-distractor task, speakers' response times (RTs) were found to speed up when they perceived a distractor syllable whose vowel was identical to the vowel in the syllable they were preparing to utter. At a more fine-grained level, subphonemic congruency between response and distractor-defined by higher number of shared phonological features or higher acoustic proximity-was also found to be predictive of RT modulations. Furthermore, the findings indicate that perception of vowel stimuli embedded in syllables gives rise to robust and more consistent perceptuomotor compatibility effects (compared to isolated vowels) across different response-distractor vowel pairs. KW - speech Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0003039 SN - 2691-1191 VL - 1 IS - 1 PB - American Institute of Physics CY - Melville ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar A1 - Küttner, Uwe-Alexander A1 - Raymond, Chase Wesley T1 - Pivots revisited BT - cesuring in action JF - Open linguistics N2 - The term "pivot" usually refers to two overlapping syntactic units such that the completion of the first unit simultaneously launches the second. In addition, pivots are generally said to be characterized by the smooth prosodic integration of their syntactic parts. This prosodic integration is typically achieved by prosodic-phonetic matching of the pivot components. As research on such turns in a range of languages has illustrated, speakers routinely deploy pivots so as to be able to continue past a point of possible turn completion, in the service of implementing some additional or revised action. This article seeks to build on, and complement, earlier research by exploring two issues in more detail as follows: (1) what exactly do pivotal turn extensions accomplish on the action dimension, and (2) what role does prosodic-phonetic packaging play in this? We will show that pivot constructions not only exhibit various degrees of prosodic-phonetic (non-)integration, i.e., differently strong cesuras, but that they can be ordered on a continuum, and that this cline maps onto the relationship of the actions accomplished by the components of the pivot construction. While tighter prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., weak(er) cesuring, co-occurs with post-pivot actions whose relationship to that of the pre-pivot tends to be rather retrospective in character, looser prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., strong(er) cesuring, is associated with a more prospective orientation of the post-pivot's action. These observations also raise more general questions with regard to the analysis of action. KW - Conversation Analysis KW - Interactional Linguistics KW - syntax KW - talk-in-interaction KW - prosody KW - phonetics KW - cesuras KW - intonation units KW - social action Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2020-0152 SN - 2300-9969 VL - 7 IS - 1 SP - 613 EP - 637 PB - de Gruyter CY - Warsaw ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Huttenlauch, Clara A1 - Beer, Carola de A1 - Hanne-Kloth, Sandra A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell T1 - Production of prosodic cues in coordinate name sequences addressing varying interlocutors JF - Laboratory phonology N2 - Prosodic boundaries can be used to disambiguate the syntactic structure of coordinated name sequences (coordinates). To answer the question whether disambiguating prosody is produced in a situationally dependent or independent manner and to contribute to our understanding of the nature of the prosody-syntax link, we systematically explored variability in the prosody of boundary productions of coordinates evoked by different contextual settings in a referential communication task. Our analysis focused on prosodic boundaries produced to distinguish sequences with different syntactic structures (i.e., with or without internal grouping of the constituents). In German, these prosodic boundaries are indicated by three major prosodic cues: f0-range, final lengthening, and pause. In line with the Proximity/Anti-Proximity principle of the syntax-prosody model by Kentner and Fery (2013), speakers clearly use all three cues for constituent grouping and prosodically mark groups within and at their right boundary, indicating that prosodic phrasing is not a local phenomenon. Intra-individually, we found a rather stable prosodic pattern across contexts. However, inter-individually speakers differed from each other with respect to the prosodic cue combinations that they (consistently) used to mark the boundaries. Overall, our data speak in favour of a close link between syntax and prosody and for situational independence of disambiguating prosody. KW - Prosodic boundaries KW - prosodic cues KW - coordinates KW - varying interlocutors KW - variability KW - f0 KW - duration KW - pre-final lengthening KW - pause Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.221 SN - 1868-6346 SN - 1868-6354 VL - 12 IS - 1 PB - Ubiquity Press CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Peters, Arne A1 - van Hattum, Marije T1 - Pseudonyms as carriers of contextualised threat in 19th-century Irish English threatening notices JF - English world-wide : a journal of varieties of English N2 - This paper explores functions of pseudonyms in written threatening communication from a cognitive sociolinguistic perspective. It addresses the semantic domains present in pseudonyms in a corpus of 19th-century Irish English threatening notices and their cognitive functions in the construction of both cultural-contextualised threat and the threatener's identity. We identify eight semantic domains that are accessed recurrently in order to create threat. Contributing to the notion of threat involves menacing war, violence, darkness and perdition directly, while also constructing a certain persona for the threatener that highlights their motivation, moral superiority, historical, local and circumstantial expertise, and their physical and mental aptitude. We argue that pseudonyms contribute to the deontic force of the threat by accessing cultural categories and schemas as well as conceptual metaphors and metonymies. Finally, we suggest that pseudonyms function as post-positioned semantic frame setters, providing a cognitive lens through which the entire threatening notice must be interpreted. KW - pseudonyms KW - threatening communication KW - Irish English KW - persona KW - construction KW - sociocultural cognition KW - context-specificity KW - post-positioned semantic frame setters Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00059.pet SN - 0172-8865 SN - 1569-9730 VL - 42 IS - 1 SP - 29 EP - 53 PB - John Benjamins Publishing Co. CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Fritzsche, Tom A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Hullebus, Marc A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. T1 - Respect the surroundings BT - effects of phonetic context variability on infants' learning of minimal pairs JF - JASA Express Letters N2 - Fourteen-month-olds' ability to distinguish a just learned word, /bu?k/, from its minimally different word, /du?k/, was assessed under two pre-exposure conditions: one where /b, d/-initial forms occurred in a varying vowel context and another where the vowel was fixed but the final consonant varied. Infants in the experiments benefited from the variable vowel but not from the variable final consonant context, suggesting that vowel variability but not all kinds of variability are beneficial. These results are discussed in the context of time-honored observations on the vowel-dependent nature of place of articulation cues for consonants. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0003574 SN - 2691-1191 VL - 1 IS - 2 PB - AIP Publ. CY - Melville ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lialiou, Maria A1 - Sotiropoulou, Stavroula A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. T1 - Spatiotemporal coordination in word-medial stop-lateral and s-stop clusters of American English JF - Phonetica : international journal of phonetic science N2 - This paper is concerned with the relation between syllabic organization and intersegmental spatiotemporal coordination using Electromagnetic Articulometry recordings from seven speakers of American English (henceforth, English). Whereas previous work on English has focused on word-initial clusters (preceding a vowel whose identity was not systematically varied), the present work examined word-medial clusters /pl, kl, sp, sk/ in the context of three different vowel heights (high, mid, low). Our results provide evidence for a global organization for the segments involved in these cluster-vowel combinations. This is reflected in a number of ways: compression of the prevocalic consonant and reduction of CV timing in the word-medial cluster case compared to its singleton paired word in both stop-lateral and s-stop clusters, early vowel initiation (as permitted by the clusters' phonetic properties), and presence of compensatory relations between phonetic properties of different segments or intersegmental transitions within each cluster. In other words, we find that the global organization presiding over the segments partaking in these word-medial tautosyllabic CCVs is pleiotropic, that is, simultaneously expressed in multiple phonetic exponents rather than via a privileged metric such as c-center stability or any other such given single measure employed in previous works. KW - American English KW - intersegmental coordination KW - s-stop clusters KW - stop-lateral clusters KW - syllabic structure Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/phon-2021-2010 SN - 0031-8388 SN - 1423-0321 VL - 78 IS - 5-6 SP - 385 EP - 433 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Horn, Peter A1 - Fritzsche, Tom A1 - Ehlert, Antje A1 - Adani, Flavia T1 - Tapping into the interplay of lexical and number knowledge using fast mapping BT - a longitudinal eye-tracking study with two-year-olds JF - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal N2 - Language skills and mathematical competencies are argued to influence each other during development. While a relation between the development of vocabulary size and mathematical skills is already documented in the literature, this study further examines how children's ability to map a novel word to an unknown object as well as their ability to retain this word from memory may be related to their knowledge of number words. Twenty-five children were tested longitudinally (at 30 and at 36 months of age) using an eye-tracking-based fast mapping task, the Give-a Number task, and standardized measures of vocabulary. The results reveal that children's ability to create and retain a mental representation of a novel word was related to number knowledge at 30 months, but not at 36 months while vocabulary size correlated with number knowledge only at 36 months. These results show that even specific mapping processes are initially related to the acquisition of number words and they speak for a parallelism between the development of lexical and number-concept knowledge despite their semantic and syntactic differences. KW - Number KW - Number knowledge KW - Cognitive development KW - Fast mapping KW - Word KW - learning KW - Cross-domain development Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101573 SN - 0163-6383 SN - 1879-0453 VL - 64 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schlickewei, Ole A1 - Nienstedt, Julie Cläre A1 - Frank, Ulrike A1 - Fründt, Odette A1 - Pötter-Nerger, Monika A1 - Gerloff, Christian A1 - Buhmann, Carsten A1 - Müller, Frank A1 - Lezius, Susanne A1 - Koseki, Jana-Christiane A1 - Pflug, Christina T1 - The ability of the eating assessment tool‑10 to detect penetration and aspiration in Parkinson’s disease JF - European archives of oto-rhino-laryngology and head & neck N2 - Purpose: Dysphagia is common in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and often leads to pneumonia, malnutrition, and reduced quality of life. This study investigates the ability of the Eating Assessment Tool-10 (EAT-10), an established, easy self-administered screening tool, to detect aspiration in PD patients. This study aims to validate the ability of the EAT-10 to detect FEES-proven aspiration in patients with PD. Methods: In a controlled prospective cross-sectional study, a total of 50 PD patients completed the EAT-10 and, subsequently, were examined by Flexible Endoscopic Evaluation of Swallowing (FEES) to determine the swallowing status. The results were rated through the Penetration-Aspiration Scale (PAS) and data were analyzed retrospectively. Results: PAS and EAT-10 did not correlate significantly. Selected items of the EAT-10 could not predict aspiration or residues. 19 (38%) out of 50 patients with either penetration or aspiration were not detected by the EAT-10. The diagnostic accuracy was established at only a sufficient level (AUC 0.65). An optimal cut-off value of >= 6 presented a sensitivity of 58% and specificity of 82%. Conclusions: The EAT-10 is not suited for the detection of penetration and aspiration in PD patients. Therefore, it cannot be used as a screening method in this patient population. There is still a need for a valid, simple, and efficient screening tool to assist physicians in their daily diagnostics and to avoid clinical complications. KW - Parkinson's disease KW - dysphagia KW - questionnaire KW - screening Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00405-020-06377-x SN - 0937-4477 SN - 1434-4726 VL - 278 IS - 5 SP - 1661 EP - 1668 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Mertzen, Daniela A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - The benefits of preregistration for hypothesis-driven bilingualism research JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition N2 - Preregistration is an open science practice that requires the specification of research hypotheses and analysis plans before the data are inspected. Here, we discuss the benefits of preregistration for hypothesis-driven, confirmatory bilingualism research. Using examples from psycholinguistics and bilingualism, we illustrate how non-peer reviewed preregistrations can serve to implement a clean distinction between hypothesis testing and data exploration. This distinction helps researchers avoid casting post-hoc hypotheses and analyses as confirmatory ones. We argue that, in keeping with current best practices in the experimental sciences, preregistration, along with sharing data and code, should be an integral part of hypothesis-driven bilingualism research. KW - preregistration KW - open science KW - bilingualism KW - psycholinguistics KW - confirmatory analysis KW - exploratory analysis Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921000031 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 24 IS - 5 SP - 807 EP - 812 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Reifegerste, Jana T1 - The effects of aging on bilingual language BT - what changes, what doesn't, and why JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition N2 - Substantial research has examined cognition in aging bilinguals. However, less work has investigated the effects of aging on language itself in bilingualism. In this article I comprehensively review prior research on this topic, and interpret the evidence in light of current theories of aging and theories of bilingualism. First, aging indeed appears to affect bilinguals' language performance, though there is considerable variability in the trajectory across adulthood (declines, age-invariance, and improvements) and in the extent to which these trajectories resemble those found in monolinguals. I argue that these age effects are likely explained by the key opposing forces of increasing experience and cognitive declines in aging. Second, consistent with some theoretical work on bilingual language processing, the grammatical processing mechanisms do not seem to change between younger and older bilingual adults, even after decades of immersion. I conclude by discussing how future research can further advance the field. KW - aging KW - bilingualism KW - second language KW - lexical processing KW - grammatical KW - processing Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728920000413 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 24 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 17 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Grubic, Mira A1 - Wierzba, Marta T1 - The German additive particle noch BT - testing the role of topic situations JF - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics N2 - The particle noch (‘still’) can have an additive reading similar to auch (‘also’). We argue that both particles indicate that a previously partially answered QUD is re-opened to add a further answer. The particles differ in that the QUD, in the case of auch, can be re-opened with respect to the same topic situation, whereas noch indicates that the QUD is re-opened with respect to a new topic situation. This account predicts a difference in the accommodation behavior of the two particles. We present an experiment whose results are in line with this prediction. KW - additive particles KW - noch KW - auch KW - German KW - topic situation KW - semantics KW - experiments Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1275 SN - 2397-1835 VL - 6 IS - 1 PB - Ubiquity Press CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Paetzel-Prüsmann, Maike A1 - Perugia, Giulia A1 - Castellano, Ginevra T1 - The influence of robot personality on the development of uncanny feelings JF - Computers in human behavior N2 - Empirical investigations on the uncanny valley have almost solely focused on the analysis of people?s noninteractive perception of a robot at first sight. Recent studies suggest, however, that these uncanny first impressions may be significantly altered over an interaction. What is yet to discover is whether certain interaction patterns can lead to a faster decline in uncanny feelings. In this paper, we present a study in which participants with limited expertise in Computer Science played a collaborative geography game with a Furhat robot. During the game, Furhat displayed one of two personalities, which corresponded to two different interaction strategies. The robot was either optimistic and encouraging, or impatient and provocative. We performed the study in a science museum and recruited participants among the visitors. Our findings suggest that a robot that is rated high on agreeableness, emotional stability, and conscientiousness can indeed weaken uncanny feelings. This study has important implications for human-robot interaction design as it further highlights that a first impression, merely based on a robot?s appearance, is not indicative of the affinity people might develop towards it throughout an interaction. We thus argue that future work should emphasize investigations on exact interaction patterns that can help to overcome uncanny feelings. KW - Human-robot interaction KW - Uncanny valley KW - Robot personality KW - Human KW - perception of robots KW - Crowd-sourcing KW - Multimodal behavior Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106756 SN - 0747-5632 SN - 1873-7692 VL - 120 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stone, Kate A1 - Verissimo, Joao A1 - Schad, Daniel J. A1 - Oltrogge, Elise A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Lago, Sol T1 - The interaction of grammatically distinct agreement dependencies in predictive processing JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience N2 - Previous research has found that comprehenders sometimes predict information that is grammatically unlicensed by sentence constraints. An open question is why such grammatically unlicensed predictions occur. We examined the possibility that unlicensed predictions arise in situations of information conflict, for instance when comprehenders try to predict upcoming words while simultaneously building dependencies with previously encountered elements in memory. German possessive pronouns are a good testing ground for this hypothesis because they encode two grammatically distinct agreement dependencies: a retrospective one between the possessive and its previously mentioned referent, and a prospective one between the possessive and its following nominal head. In two visual world eye-tracking experiments, we estimated the onset of predictive effects in participants' fixations. The results showed that the retrospective dependency affected resolution of the prospective dependency by shifting the onset of predictive effects. We attribute this effect to an interaction between predictive and memory retrieval processes. KW - sentence processing KW - visual world eye-tracking KW - prediction KW - gender KW - agreement KW - German Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2021.1921816 SN - 2327-3798 SN - 2327-3801 VL - 36 IS - 9 SP - 1159 EP - 1179 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Mazzarella, Diana A1 - Gotzner, Nicole T1 - The polarity asymmetry of negative strengthening BT - dissociating adjectival polarity from face-threatening potential JF - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics N2 - The interpretation of negated antonyms is characterised by a polarity asymmetry: the negation of a positive polarity antonym (X is not interesting) is more likely to be strengthened to convey its opposite ('X is uninteresting') than the negation of a negative polarity antonym (X is not uninteresting to convey that 'X is interesting') is. A classical explanation of this asymmetry relies on face-management. Since the predication of a negative polarity antonym (X is uninteresting) is potentially face-threatening in most contexts, the negation of the corresponding positive polarity antonym (X is not interesting) is more likely to be interpreted as an indirect strategy to minimise face-threat while getting the message across. We present two experimental studies in which we test the predictions of this explanation. In contrast with it, our results show that adjectival polarity, but not face-threatening potential, appears to be responsible for the asymmetric interpretation of negated antonyms. KW - negation KW - polarity KW - antonyms KW - negative strengthening KW - politeness KW - face Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1342 SN - 2397-1835 VL - 6 IS - 1 PB - Open Library of Humanities CY - London 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 - 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 - 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 -