TY - JOUR
A1 - Fanselow, Gisbert
A1 - Zimmermann, Malte
A1 - Philipp, Mareike
T1 - Assessing the availability of inverse scope in German in the covered box paradigm
JF - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics
N2 - This paper presents the results of a novel experimental approach to relative quantifier scope in German that elicits data in an indirect manner. Applying the covered-box method (Huang et al. 2013) to scope phenomena, we show that inverse scope is available to some extent in the free constituent order language German, thereby validating earlier findings on other syntactic configurations in German (Rado & Bott 2018) and empirical claims on other free constituent order languages (Japanese, Russian, Hindi), as well as recent corpus findings in Webelhuth (2020). Moreover, the results of the indirect covered-box experiment replicate findings from an earlier direct-query experiment with comparable target items, in which participants were asked directly about the availability of surface scope and inverse scope readings. The configuration of interest consisted of canonical transitive clauses with deaccented existential subject and universal object QPs, in which the restriction of the universal QP was controlled for by the context.
KW - inverse scope
KW - covered-box
KW - free constituent order
KW - German
KW - experimental semantics
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5766
SN - 2397-1835
VL - 7
IS - 1
SP - 1
EP - 24
PB - Open Library of Humanities
CY - London
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Avetisyan, Serine
A1 - Lago, Sol
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - Does case marking affect agreement attraction in comprehension?
JF - Journal of memory and language
N2 - Previous studies have suggested that distinctive case marking on noun phrases reduces attraction effects in production, i.e., the tendency to produce a verb that agrees with a nonsubject noun. An important open question is whether attraction effects are modulated by case information in sentence comprehension. To address this question, we conducted three attraction experiments in Armenian, a language with a rich and productive case system. The experiments showed clear attraction effects, and they also revealed an overall role of case marking such that participants showed faster response and reading times when the nouns in the sentence had different case. However, we found little indication that distinctive case marking modulated attraction effects. We present a theoretical proposal of how case and number information may be used differentially during agreement licensing in comprehension. More generally, this work sheds light on the nature of the retrieval cues deployed when completing morphosyntactic dependencies.
KW - subject-verb agreement
KW - attraction
KW - Case
KW - Eastern Armenian
KW - cue-based
KW - retrieval
KW - comprehension
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104087
SN - 0749-596X
SN - 1096-0821
VL - 112
PB - Elsevier
CY - San Diego
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris
A1 - Viebahn, Malte Clemens
A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I.
T1 - Plasticity and transfer in the sound system
BT - exposure to syllables in production or perception changes their subsequent production
JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2 - This study focuses on the ability of the adult sound system to reorganise as a result of experience. Participants were exposed to existing and novel syllables in either a listening task or a production task over the course of two days. On the third day, they named disyllabic pseudowords while their electroencephalogram was recorded. The first syllable of these pseudowords had either been trained in the auditory modality, trained in production or had not been trained. The EEG response differed between existing and novel syllables for untrained but not for trained syllables, indicating that training novel sound sequences modifies the processes involved in the production of these sequences to make them more similar to those underlying the production of existing sound sequences. Effects of training on the EEG response were observed both after production training and mere auditory exposure.
KW - Language production
KW - EEG
KW - syllables
KW - phonetic encoding
KW - transfer
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2020.1782445
SN - 2327-3798
SN - 2327-3801
VL - 35
IS - 10
SP - 1371
EP - 1393
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - Abingdon
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 - GEN
A1 - Stone, Kate
A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
A1 - Rösler, Frank
T1 - Understanding the effects of constraint and predictability in ERP
T2 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2 - Intuitively, strongly constraining contexts should lead to stronger probabilistic representations of sentences in memory. Encountering unexpected words could therefore be expected to trigger costlier shifts in these representations than expected words. However, psycholinguistic measures commonly used to study probabilistic processing, such as the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, are sensitive to word predictability but not to contextual constraint. Some research suggests that constraint-related processing cost may be measurable via an ERP positivity following the N400, known as the anterior post-N400 positivity (PNP). The PNP is argued to reflect update of a sentence representation and to be distinct from the posterior P600, which reflects conflict detection and reanalysis. However, constraint-related PNP findings are inconsistent. We sought to conceptually replicate Federmeier et al. (2007) and Kuperberg et al. (2020), who observed that the PNP, but not the N400 or the P600, was affected by constraint at unexpected but plausible words. Using a pre-registered design and statistical approach maximising power, we demonstrated a dissociated effect of predictability and constraint: strong evidence for predictability but not constraint in the N400 window, and strong evidence for constraint but not predictability in the later window. However, the constraint effect was consistent with a P600 and not a PNP, suggesting increased conflict between a strong representation and unexpected input rather than greater update of the representation. We conclude that either a simple strong/weak constraint design is not always sufficient to elicit the PNP, or that previous PNP constraint findings could be an artifact of smaller sample size.
T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 829
KW - N400
KW - anterior PNP
KW - posterior P600
KW - probabilistic processing
KW - constraint
KW - predictability
KW - entropy
Y1 - 2023
U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-587594
SN - 1866-8364
IS - 829
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Stone, Kate
A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
A1 - Rösler, Frank
T1 - Understanding the effects of constraint and predictability in ERP
JF - Neurobiology of language
N2 - Intuitively, strongly constraining contexts should lead to stronger probabilistic representations of sentences in memory. Encountering unexpected words could therefore be expected to trigger costlier shifts in these representations than expected words. However, psycholinguistic measures commonly used to study probabilistic processing, such as the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, are sensitive to word predictability but not to contextual constraint. Some research suggests that constraint-related processing cost may be measurable via an ERP positivity following the N400, known as the anterior post-N400 positivity (PNP). The PNP is argued to reflect update of a sentence representation and to be distinct from the posterior P600, which reflects conflict detection and reanalysis. However, constraint-related PNP findings are inconsistent. We sought to conceptually replicate Federmeier et al. (2007) and Kuperberg et al. (2020), who observed that the PNP, but not the N400 or the P600, was affected by constraint at unexpected but plausible words. Using a pre-registered design and statistical approach maximising power, we demonstrated a dissociated effect of predictability and constraint: strong evidence for predictability but not constraint in the N400 window, and strong evidence for constraint but not predictability in the later window. However, the constraint effect was consistent with a P600 and not a PNP, suggesting increased conflict between a strong representation and unexpected input rather than greater update of the representation. We conclude that either a simple strong/weak constraint design is not always sufficient to elicit the PNP, or that previous PNP constraint findings could be an artifact of smaller sample size.
KW - N400
KW - anterior PNP
KW - posterior P600
KW - probabilistic processing
KW - constraint
KW - predictability
KW - entropy
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00094
SN - 2641-4368
VL - 4
IS - 2
SP - 221
EP - 256
PB - MIT Press
CY - Cambridge, MA, USA
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Paape, Dario
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban
T1 - Quadruplex negatio invertit?
BT - the on-line processing of depth charge sentences
JF - Journal of semantics
N2 - So-called "depth charge" sentences (No head injury is too trivial to be ignored) are interpreted by the vast majority of speakers to mean the opposite of what their compositional semantics would dictate. The semantic inversion that is observed for sentences of this type is the strongest and most persistent linguistic illusion known to the field (Wason & Reich, 1979). However, it has recently been argued that the preferred interpretation arises not because of a prevailing failure of the processing system, but rather because the non-compositional meaning is grammaticalized in the form of a stored construction (Cook & Stevenson, 2010; Fortuin, 2014). In a series of five experiments, we investigate whether the depth charge effect is better explained by processing failure due to memory overload (the overloading hypothesis) or by the existence of an underlying grammaticalized construction with two available meanings (the ambiguity hypothesis). To our knowledge, our experiments are the first to explore the on-line processing profile of depth charge sentences. Overall, the data are consistent with specific variants of the ambiguity and overloading hypotheses while providing evidence against other variants. As an extension of the overloading hypothesis, we suggest two heuristic processes that may ultimately yield the incorrect reading when compositional processing is suspended for strategic reasons.
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffaa009
SN - 0167-5133
SN - 1477-4593
VL - 37
IS - 4
SP - 509
EP - 555
PB - Oxford Univ. Press
CY - Oxford
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Ren, Jie
A1 - Höhle, Barbara
T1 - The interplay between language acquisition and cognitive development
JF - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal
KW - Language Acquisition
KW - Cognitive Development
KW - Infancy
KW - Cross-domain
KW - Development
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101718
SN - 0163-6383
SN - 1879-0453
SN - 1934-8800
VL - 67
PB - Elsevier Science
CY - Amsterdam
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Stone, Kate
A1 - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - The effect of decay and lexical uncertainty on processing long-distance dependencies in reading
JF - PeerJ
N2 - To make sense of a sentence, a reader must keep track of dependent relationships between words, such as between a verb and its particle (e.g. turn the music down). In languages such as German, verb-particle dependencies often span long distances, with the particle only appearing at the end of the clause. This means that it may be necessary to process a large amount of intervening sentence material before the full verb of the sentence is known. To facilitate processing, previous studies have shown that readers can preactivate the lexical information of neighbouring upcoming words, but less is known about whether such preactivation can be sustained over longer distances. We asked the question, do readers preactivate lexical information about long-distance verb particles? In one self-paced reading and one eye tracking experiment, we delayed the appearance of an obligatory verb particle that varied only in the predictability of its lexical identity. We additionally manipulated the length of the delay in order to test two contrasting accounts of dependency processing: that increased distance between dependent elements may sharpen expectation of the distant word and facilitate its processing (an antilocality effect), or that it may slow processing via temporal activation decay (a locality effect). We isolated decay by delaying the particle with a neutral noun modifier containing no information about the identity of the upcoming particle, and no known sources of interference or working memory load. Under the assumption that readers would preactivate the lexical representations of plausible verb particles, we hypothesised that a smaller number of plausible particles would lead to stronger preactivation of each particle, and thus higher predictability of the target. This in turn should have made predictable target particles more resistant to the effects of decay than less predictable target particles. The eye tracking experiment provided evidence that higher predictability did facilitate reading times, but found evidence against any effect of decay or its interaction with predictability. The self-paced reading study provided evidence against any effect of predictability or temporal decay, or their interaction. In sum, we provide evidence from eye movements that readers preactivate long-distance lexical content and that adding neutral sentence information does not induce detectable decay of this activation. The findings are consistent with accounts suggesting that delaying dependency resolution may only affect processing if the intervening information either confirms expectations or adds to working memory load, and that temporal activation decay alone may not be a major predictor of processing time.
KW - reading
KW - comprehension
KW - temporal decay
KW - preactivation
KW - long distance
KW - dependencies
KW - entropy
KW - psycholinguistics
KW - locality
KW - antilocality
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10438
SN - 2167-8359
VL - 8
PB - PeerJ Inc.
CY - London
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Krasotkina, Anna
A1 - Götz, Antonia
A1 - Höhle, Barbara
A1 - Schwarzer, Gudrun
T1 - Infants’ gaze patterns for same-race and other-race faces, and the other-race effect
JF - Brain Sciences
N2 - The other-race effect (ORE) can be described as difficulties in discriminating between faces of ethnicities other than one's own, and can already be observed at approximately 9 months of age. Recent studies also showed that infants visually explore same-and other-race faces differently. However, it is still unclear whether infants' looking behavior for same- and other-race faces is related to their face discrimination abilities. To investigate this question we conducted a habituation-dishabituation experiment to examine Caucasian 9-month-old infants' gaze behavior, and their discrimination of same- and other-race faces, using eye-tracking measurements. We found that infants looked longer at the eyes of same-race faces over the course of habituation, as compared to other-race faces. After habituation, infants demonstrated a clear other-race effect by successfully discriminating between same-race faces, but not other-race faces. Importantly, the infants' ability to discriminate between same-race faces significantly correlated with their fixation time towards the eyes of same-race faces during habituation. Thus, our findings suggest that for infants old enough to begin exhibiting the ORE, gaze behavior during habituation is related to their ability to differentiate among same-race faces, compared to other-race faces.
KW - eye-tracking
KW - infancy
KW - habituation
KW - other-race effect
KW - face
KW - discrimination
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10060331
SN - 2076-3425
VL - 10
IS - 6
PB - Brain Sciences
CY - Basel
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Genzel, Susanne
A1 - Kügler, Frank
T1 - Production and perception of question prosody in Akan
JF - Journal of the International Phonetic Association
N2 - The paper presents a production experiment investigating the phonetic parameters speakers employ to differentiate Yes-No questions from string-identical statements in Akan, a West-African two-tone Kwa language. Results show that, in comparison to the statement, speakers use a higher pitch register throughout the utterance as a global parameter, and falling f0, longer duration and higher intensity as local parameters on the final syllable of the Yes-No question. Further, two perception experiments (forced-choice identification and gating) investigate the perceptual relevance of the global parameter and the local final parameters. Results show that listeners cannot assess the higher pitch register information to identify the mode of a sentence early on. Rather, identification takes place when the local phonetic parameters on the final vowel are available. The findings point to the superiority of language-specific cues in sentence mode perception. It is suggested that Akan uses a low boundary tone that associates with the right edge of the intonation phrase (L%) in Yes-No questions. The results are discussed from the point of view of question intonation typology in African languages. It is argued that a classification along the lines of functionally relevant cues is preferable to an impressionistic analysis.
Y1 - 2018
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100318000191
SN - 0025-1003
SN - 1475-3502
VL - 50
IS - 1
SP - 61
EP - 92
PB - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY - Cambridge
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Amaechi, Mary Chimaobi
A1 - Georgi, Doreen
T1 - On optional wh-/focus fronting in Igbo
BT - a SYN-SEM-PHON interaction
JF - Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft
N2 - This paper discusses surface optionality in focus fronting in the Benue-Congo language Igbo. A focused XP can occur in-situ or ex-situ. We argue that the optionality does not have its origins in the syntax: in fact, exactly one focused XP has to move to the designated focus position in the left periphery in the syntax. The alternation between in-situ and ex-situ rather arises at PF: either the lowest or the topmost copy of the focus chain is pronounced. The choice is determined by semantic-pragmatic factors, i. e., we see an interaction between PF and LF. This constitutes a challenge for a strict version of the Y-model of grammar.
KW - (A)over-bar-movement
KW - focus realization
KW - PF-optionality
KW - Y-model
KW - copy
KW - pronounciation
KW - Benue-Congo languages
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/zfs-2020-2017
SN - 0721-9067
SN - 1613-3706
VL - 39
IS - 3
SP - 299
EP - 327
PB - De Gruyter
CY - Berlin
ER -
TY - THES
A1 - Yadav, Himanshu
T1 - A computational evaluation of feature distortion and cue weighting in sentence comprehension
T1 - Eine komputationale Evaluation von Feature-Verfälschung und Cue-Gewichtung in der Satzverarbeitung
N2 - Successful sentence comprehension requires the comprehender to correctly figure out who did what to whom. For example, in the sentence John kicked the ball, the comprehender has to figure out who did the action of kicking and what was being kicked. This process of identifying and connecting the syntactically-related words in a sentence is called dependency completion. What are the cognitive constraints that determine dependency completion? A widely-accepted theory is cue-based retrieval. The theory maintains that dependency completion is driven by a content-addressable search for the co-dependents in memory. The cue-based retrieval explains a wide range of empirical data from several constructions including subject-verb agreement, subject-verb non-agreement, plausibility mismatch configurations, and negative polarity items.
However, there are two major empirical challenges to the theory: (i) Grammatical sentences’ data from subject-verb number agreement dependencies, where the theory predicts a slowdown at the verb in sentences like the key to the cabinet was rusty compared to the key to the cabinets was rusty, but the data are inconsistent with this prediction; and, (ii) Data from antecedent-reflexive dependencies, where a facilitation in reading times is predicted at the reflexive in the bodybuilder who worked with the trainers injured themselves vs. the bodybuilder who worked with the trainer injured themselves, but the data do not show a facilitatory effect.
The work presented in this dissertation is dedicated to building a more general theory of dependency completion that can account for the above two datasets without losing the original empirical coverage of the cue-based retrieval assumption. In two journal articles, I present computational modeling work that addresses the above two empirical challenges.
To explain the grammatical sentences’ data from subject-verb number agreement dependencies, I propose a new model that assumes that the cue-based retrieval operates on a probabilistically distorted representation of nouns in memory (Article I). This hybrid distortion-plus-retrieval model was compared against the existing candidate models using data from 17 studies on subject-verb number agreement in 4 languages. I find that the hybrid model outperforms the existing models of number agreement processing suggesting that the cue-based retrieval theory must incorporate a feature distortion assumption.
To account for the absence of facilitatory effect in antecedent-reflexive dependen� cies, I propose an individual difference model, which was built within the cue-based retrieval framework (Article II). The model assumes that individuals may differ in how strongly they weigh a syntactic cue over a number cue. The model was fitted to data from two studies on antecedent-reflexive dependencies, and the participant-level cue-weighting was estimated. We find that one-fourth of the participants, in both studies, weigh the syntactic cue higher than the number cue in processing reflexive dependencies and the remaining participants weigh the two cues equally. The result indicates that the absence of predicted facilitatory effect at the level of grouped data is driven by some, not all, participants who weigh syntactic cues higher than the number cue. More generally, the result demonstrates that the assumption of differential cue weighting is important for a theory of dependency completion processes. This differential cue weighting idea was independently supported by a modeling study on subject-verb non-agreement dependencies (Article III).
Overall, the cue-based retrieval, which is a general theory of dependency completion, needs to incorporate two new assumptions: (i) the nouns stored in memory can undergo probabilistic feature distortion, and (ii) the linguistic cues used for retrieval can be weighted differentially. This is the cumulative result of the modeling work presented in this dissertation.
The dissertation makes an important theoretical contribution: Sentence comprehension in humans is driven by a mechanism that assumes cue-based retrieval, probabilistic feature distortion, and differential cue weighting. This insight is theoretically important because there is some independent support for these three assumptions in sentence processing and the broader memory literature. The modeling work presented here is also methodologically important because for the first time, it demonstrates (i) how the complex models of sentence processing can be evaluated using data from multiple studies simultaneously, without oversimplifying the models, and (ii) how the inferences drawn from the individual-level behavior can be used in theory development.
N2 - Bei der Satzverarbeitung muss der Leser richtig herausfinden, wer wem was angetan hat. Zum Beispiel muss der Leser in dem Satz „John hat den Ball getreten“ herausfinden, wer tat die Aktion des Tretens und was getreten wurde. Dieser Prozess des Identifizierens und Verbindens der syntaktisch verwandte Wörter in einem Satz nennt man Dependency-Completion. Was sind die kognitiven Mechanismen, die Dependency-Completion bestimmen?
Eine weithin akzeptierte Theorie ist der Cue-based retrieval. Die Theorie besagt, dass die Dependency-Completion durch eine inhaltsadressierbare Suche nach der vorangetrieben wird Co-Abhängige im Gedächtnis. Der Cue-basierte Abruf erklärt ein breites Spektrum an empirischen Daten mehrere Konstruktionen, darunter Subjekt-Verb-Übereinstimmung, Subjekt-Verb-Nichtübereinstimmung, Plausibilität Mismatch-Konfigurationen und Elemente mit negativer Polarität.
Es gibt jedoch zwei große empirische Herausforderungen für die Theorie: (i) Grammatische Sätze Daten aus Subjekt-Verb-Nummer-Dependency, bei denen die Theorie eine Verlangsamung vorhersagt das Verb in Sätzen wie „the key to the cabinet was rusty“ im Vergleich zu „the key to the cabinets was rusty“, aber die Daten stimmen nicht mit dieser Vorhersage überein; und (ii) Daten von Antezedenz-Reflexiv Strukturen, wo eine Leseerleichterung beim reflexiven „the bodybuilder who worked with the trainers injured themselves“ vs. „the bodybuilder who worked with the trainers injured themselves", aber die Daten zeigen keine vermittelnde Wirkung.
Die in dieser Dissertation vorgestellte Arbeit widmet sich dem Aufbau einer allgemeineren Theorie von Dependency-Completion, die die beiden oben genannten Datensätze berücksichtigen kann, ohne das Original zu verlieren empirische Abdeckung der Cue-based Retrieval-Annahme. In zwei Zeitschriftenartikeln stelle ich Arbeiten zur Computermodellierung vor, die sich mit den beiden oben genannten empirischen Herausforderungen befassen. Um die Daten der grammatikalischen Sätze aus den Abhängigkeiten der Subjekt-Verb-Nummer-Übereinstimmung zu erklären, schlage ich ein neues Modell vor, das davon ausgeht, dass der Cue-basierte Abruf probabilistisch funktioniert verzerrte Darstellung von Substantiven im Gedächtnis (Artikel I). Dieses hybride Distortion-plus-Retrieval-Modell wurde anhand von Daten aus 17 Studien zu Subjekt-Verb mit den bestehenden Kandidatenmodellen verglichen Nummernvereinbarung in 4 Sprachen. Ich finde, dass das Hybridmodell die bestehenden Modelle übertrifft der Nummernvereinbarungsverarbeitung, was darauf hindeutet, dass die Cue-based Retrieval-Theorie Folgendes umfassen muss: a Annahme von Feature-Verfälschung. Um das Fehlen eines unterstützenden Effekts in antezedens-reflexiven Abhängigkeiten zu berücksichtigen, schlage ich ein individuelles Differenzmodell vor, das innerhalb des Cue-based Retrieval-Frameworks erstellt wurde (Artikel II). Das Modell geht davon aus, dass Individuen sich darin unterscheiden können, wie stark sie eine Syntax gewichten Cue über einem Nummern-Cue. Das Modell wurde an Daten aus zwei Studien zum Antezedenz-Reflexiv angepasst Abhängigkeiten, und die Cue-Gewichtung auf Teilnehmerebene wurde geschätzt. Wir finden, dass ein Viertel von Die Teilnehmer in beiden Studien gewichten bei der Verarbeitung den syntaktischen Cue höher als den numerischen Cue reflexive Abhängigkeiten und die verbleibenden Teilnehmer gewichten die beiden Cue gleichermaßen. Das Ergebnis weist darauf hin, dass das Fehlen des prognostizierten Erleichterungseffekts auf der Ebene der gruppierten Daten von einigen, nicht alle Teilnehmer, die syntaktische Cue höher gewichten als Zahlenhinweise. Allgemeiner gesagt, die Das Ergebnis zeigt, dass die Annahme einer differentiellen Hinweisgewichtung wichtig für eine Theorie von ist Dependency-Completion. Diese Idee der differentiellen Cue-Gewichtung wurde unabhängig unterstützt durch eine Modellierungsstudie zu Subjekt-Verb-Nichteinigungsabhängigkeiten (Artikel III).
Insgesamt benötigt der Cue-basierte Abruf, der eine allgemeine Theorie der Abhängigkeitsvervollständigung ist um zwei neue Annahmen aufzunehmen: (i) die im Gedächtnis gespeicherten Substantive können einer Wahrscheinlichkeitsanalyse unterzogen werden Feature-Verfälschung, und (ii) die für den Abruf verwendeten sprachlichen Cue können unterschiedlich gewichtet werden. Das ist das kumulative Ergebnis der in dieser Dissertation vorgestellten Modellierungsarbeit.Die Dissertation leistet einen wichtigen theoretischen Beitrag: Satzverständnis in Der Mensch wird von einem Mechanismus getrieben, der einen hinweisbasierten Abruf, eine probabilistische Merkmalsverzerrung und eine differentielle Hinweisgewichtung annimmt. Diese Einsicht ist theoretisch wichtig, weil es einige gibt unabhängige Unterstützung für diese drei Annahmen in der Satzverarbeitung und im weiteren Gedächtnis Literatur. Die hier vorgestellten Modellierungsarbeiten sind auch methodisch wichtig, weil für die Zum ersten Mal wird gezeigt, (i) wie die komplexen Modelle der Satzverarbeitung evaluiert werden können Daten aus mehreren Studien gleichzeitig zu verwenden, ohne die Modelle zu stark zu vereinfachen, und (ii) wie die Schlussfolgerungen aus dem Verhalten auf individueller Ebene können in der Theorieentwicklung verwendet werden.
KW - sentence comprehension
KW - individual differences
KW - cue-based retrieval
KW - memory distortion
KW - Approximate Bayesian Computation
KW - cue reliability
KW - ungefähre Bayessche Komputation
KW - Cue-Gewichtung
KW - Cue-basierter Retrieval
KW - individuelle Unterschiede
KW - Darstellung Verfälschung
KW - Satzverarbeitung
Y1 - 2023
U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-585055
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I.
A1 - Lieshout, Pascal H. H. M. van
T1 - Models and theories of speech production
BT - editorial
JF - Frontiers in psychology
KW - speech production
KW - motor control
KW - dynamical models
KW - phonology
KW - speech
KW - disorders
KW - timing
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01238
SN - 1664-1078
VL - 11
PB - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY - Lausanne
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Fuhrmeister, Pamela
A1 - Smith, Garrett
A1 - Myers, Emily B.
T1 - Overlearning of non-native speech sounds does not result in superior consolidation after a period of sleep
JF - The journal of the Acoustical Society of America
N2 - Recent studies suggest that sleep-mediated consolidation processes help adults learn non-native speech sounds. However, overnight improvement was not seen when participants learned in the morning, perhaps resulting from native-language interference. The current study trained participants to perceive the Hindi dental/retroflex contrast in the morning and tested whether increased training can lead to overnight improvement. Results showed overnight effects regardless of training amount. In contrast to previous studies, participants in this study heard sounds in limited contexts (i.e., one talker and one vowel context), corroborating other findings, suggesting that overnight improvement is seen in non-native phonetic learning when variability is limited.
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0000943
SN - 0001-4966
SN - 1520-8524
VL - 147
IS - 3
SP - EL289
EP - EL294
PB - American Institute of Physics
CY - Melville
ER -
TY - THES
A1 - Galetzka, Fabian
T1 - Investigating and improving background context consistency in neural conversation models
N2 - Neural conversation models aim to predict appropriate contributions to a (given) conversation by using neural networks trained on dialogue data. A specific strand focuses on non-goal driven dialogues, first proposed by Ritter et al. (2011): They investigated the task of transforming an utterance into an appropriate reply. Then, this strand evolved into dialogue system approaches using long dialogue histories and additional background context. Contributing meaningful and appropriate to a conversation is a complex task, and therefore research in this area has been very diverse: Serban et al. (2016), for example, looked into utilizing variable length dialogue histories, Zhang et al. (2018) added additional context to the dialogue history, Wolf et al. (2019) proposed a model based on pre-trained Self-Attention neural networks (Vasvani et al., 2017), and Dinan et al. (2021) investigated safety issues of these approaches. This trend can be seen as a transformation from trying to somehow carry on a conversation to generating appropriate replies in a controlled and reliable way.
In this thesis, we first elaborate the meaning of appropriateness in the context of neural conversation models by drawing inspiration from the Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1975). We first define what an appropriate contribution has to be by operationalizing these maxims as demands on conversation models: being fluent, informative, consistent towards given context, coherent and following a social norm. Then, we identify different targets (or intervention points) to achieve the conversational appropriateness by investigating recent research in that field.
In this thesis, we investigate the aspect of consistency towards context in greater detail, being one aspect of our interpretation of appropriateness.
During the research, we developed a new context-based dialogue dataset (KOMODIS) that combines factual and opinionated context to dialogues. The KOMODIS
dataset is publicly available and we use the data in this thesis to gather new insights in context-augmented dialogue generation.
We further introduced a new way of encoding context within Self-Attention based neural networks. For that, we elaborate the issue of space complexity from knowledge graphs,
and propose a concise encoding strategy for structured context inspired from graph neural networks (Gilmer et al., 2017) to reduce the space complexity of the additional context. We discuss limitations of context-augmentation for neural conversation models, explore the characteristics of knowledge graphs, and explain how we create and augment knowledge graphs for our experiments.
Lastly, we analyzed the potential of reinforcement and transfer learning to improve context-consistency for neural conversation models. We find that current reward functions need to be more precise to enable the potential of reinforcement learning, and that sequential transfer learning can improve the subjective quality of generated dialogues.
N2 - Neuronale Konversationsmodelle versuchen einen angemessenen Beitrag zu einer (gegebenen) Konversation zu erzeugen, indem neuronale Netze auf Dialogdaten trainiert werden. Ein spezieller Forschungszweig beschäftigt sich mit den nicht-zielgeführten Dialogen, erstmals vorgestellt von Ritter et al. (2011): Das Team untersuchte die Aufgabe der Transformation einer Äußerung in eine angemessene Antwort. Im Laufe der Zeit hat dieser Zweig Dialogsystem-Ansätze hervorgebracht, die lange Konversationen und zusätzlichen Kontext verarbeiten können. Einen sinnvollen und angemessenen Beitrag zu einem Gespräch zu leisten, ist eine komplexe Aufgabe, und daher war die Forschung auf diesem Gebiet sehr vielfältig: Serban et al. (2016) untersuchten beispielsweise die Verwendung von Dialogverläufen variabler Länge, Zhang et al. (2018) fügten der Dialoggeschichte zusätzlichen Kontext hinzu, Wolf et al. (2019) schlugen ein Modell vor, das auf vortrainierten neuronalen Self-Attention Schichten basiert (Vasvani et al., 2017), und Dinan et al. (2021) untersuchten Ansätze zur Kontrolle von unangebrachten Inhalten, wie zum Beispiel Beleidigungen. Dieser Trend kann als Transformation gesehen werden, der vom Versuch, ein Gespräch irgendwie fortzuführen, hin zum kontrollierten und zuverlässigen Generieren angemessener Antworten reicht.
In dieser Arbeit untersuchen wir den Aspekt der Kontextkonsistenz genauer, der ein Aspekt unserer Interpretation von einem angemessenen Konversationsbeitrag ist.
Während der Untersuchungen haben wir einen neuen kontextbasierten Dialogdatensatz (KOMODIS) entwickelt, der sachlichen und meinungsbezogenen Kontext zu Dialogen kombiniert. Der KOMODIS Datensatz ist öffentlich verfügbar, und wir verwenden die Daten in dieser Arbeit, um neue Einblicke in die kontextunterstützte Dialoggenerierung zu gewinnen.
Wir haben außerdem eine neue Methode zur Eingabe von Kontext auf Self-Attention basierenden neuronalen Netzen entwickelt. Dazu erörtern wir zunächst das Problem der begrenzten Eingabelänge für Sequenzen aus Wissensgraphen in solche Modelle,
und schlagen eine effiziente Codierungsstrategie für strukturierten Kontext vor, die von Graph Neural Networks inspiriert ist (Gilmer et al., 2017), um die Komplexität des zusätzlichen Kontexts zu reduzieren. Wir diskutieren die Grenzen der Kontexterweiterung für neuronale Konversationsmodelle, untersuchen die Eigenschaften von Wissensgraphen und erklären, wie wir Wissensgraphen für unsere Experimente erstellen und erweitern können.
Schließlich haben wir das Potenzial von Reinforcement Learning und Transfer Learning analysiert, um die Kontextkonsistenz für neuronale Konversationsmodelle zu verbessern. Wir stellen fest, dass aktuelle Reward Funktionen präziser sein müssen, um das Potenzial von Reinforcement Learning zu nutzen, und dass Sequential Transfer Learning die subjektive Qualität der generierten Dialoge verbessern kann.
KW - conversational ai
KW - neural conversation models
KW - context consistency
KW - gpt
KW - conversation
KW - dialogue
KW - deep learning
KW - knowledge graphs
KW - Kontextkonsistenz
KW - Konversation
KW - Dialog KI
KW - Deep Learning
KW - Dialog
KW - GPT
KW - Wissensgraph
KW - neuronale Konversationsmodelle
Y1 - 2022
U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-584637
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 - Ghaffarvand Mokari, Payam
A1 - Sardhaei, Nasim Mahdinezhad
T1 - Predictive power of cepstral coefficients and spectral moments in the classification of Azerbaijani fricatives
JF - The journal of the Acoustical Society of America
N2 - This study compares the classification of Azerbaijani fricatives based on two sets of features: (a) spectral moments, spectral peak, amplitude, duration, and (b) cepstral coefficients employing Hidden Markov Models to divide each fricative into three regions such that the variances of the measures within each region are minimized. The cepstral coefficients were found to be more reliable predictors in the classification of all nine Azerbaijani fricatives and the cepstral measures yielded highly successful classification rates (91.21% across both genders) in the identification of the full set of fricatives of Azerbaijani.
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0000830
SN - 0001-4966
SN - 1520-8524
VL - 147
IS - 3
SP - EL228
EP - EL234
PB - American Institute of Physics
CY - Melville
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 - 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 - Ciaccio, Laura Anna
A1 - Kgolo, Naledi
A1 - Clahsen, Harald
T1 - Morphological decomposition in Bantu
BT - a masked priming study on Setswana prefixation
JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2 - African languages have rarely been the subject of psycholinguistic experimentation. The current study employs a masked visual priming experiment to investigate morphological processing in a Bantu language, Setswana. Our study takes advantage of the rich system of prefixes in Bantu languages, which offers the opportunity of testing morphological priming effects from prefixed inflected words and directly comparing them to priming effects from prefixed derived words on the same targets. We found significant priming effects of similar magnitude for both prefixed inflected and derived word forms, which were clearly dissociable from prime-target relatedness in both meaning and (orthographic) form. These findings provide support for a (possibly universal) mechanism of morphological decomposition applied during early visual word recognition that segments both (prefixed) inflected and derived word forms into their morphological constituents.
KW - prefixes
KW - inflection
KW - affix stripping
KW - visual word recognition
KW - African
KW - languages
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2020.1722847
SN - 2327-3798
SN - 2327-3801
VL - 35
IS - 10
SP - 1257
EP - 1271
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - Abingdon
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 - Czapka, Sophia
A1 - Wotschack, Christiane
A1 - Klassert, Annegret
A1 - Festman, Julia
T1 - A path to the bilingual advantage
BT - pairwise matching of individuals
JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition
N2 - Matching participants (as suggested by Hope, 2015) may be one promising option for research on a potential bilingual advantage in executive functions (EF). In this study we first compared performances in three EF-tasks of a naturally heterogeneous sample of monolingual (n = 69, age = 9.0 y) and multilingual children (n = 57, age = 9.3 y). Secondly, we meticulously matched participants pairwise to obtain two highly homogeneous groups to rerun our analysis and investigate a potential bilingual advantage. The initally disadvantaged multilinguals (regarding socioeconomic status and German lexicon size) performed worse in updating and response inhibition, but similarly in interference inhibition. This indicates that superior EF compensate for the detrimental effects of the background variables. After matching children pairwise on age, gender, intelligence, socioeconomic status and German lexicon size, performances became similar except for interference inhibition. Here, an advantage for multilinguals in the form of globally reduced reaction times emerged, indicating a bilingual executive processing advantage.
KW - executive functions
KW - bilingualism
KW - interference inhibition
KW - pairwise
KW - matching
KW - primary school children
KW - background variables
KW - lexicon size
Y1 - 2019
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000166
SN - 1366-7289
SN - 1469-1841
VL - 23
IS - 2
SP - 344
EP - 354
PB - Cambridge Univ. 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 - 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 - THES
A1 - Wellmann, Caroline
T1 - Early sensitivity to prosodic phrase boundary cues: Behavioral evidence from German-learning infants
T1 - Frühkindliche Wahrnehmung prosodischer Grenzmarkierungen: Behaviorale Untersuchungen mit Deutsch lernenden Säuglingen
N2 - This dissertation seeks to shed light on the relation of phrasal prosody and developmental speech perception in German-learning infants. Three independent empirical studies explore the role of acoustic correlates of major prosodic boundaries, specifically pitch change, final lengthening, and pause, in infant boundary perception. Moreover, it was examined whether the sensitivity to prosodic phrase boundary markings changes during the first year of life as a result of perceptual attunement to the ambient language (Aslin & Pisoni, 1980).
Using the headturn preference procedure six- and eight-month-old monolingual German-learning infants were tested on their discrimination of two different prosodic groupings of the same list of coordinated names either with or without an internal IPB after the second name, that is, [Moni und Lilli] [und Manu] or [Moni und Lilli und Manu]. The boundary marking was systematically varied with respect to single prosodic cues or specific cue combinations.
Results revealed that six- and eight-month-old German-learning infants successfully detect the internal prosodic boundary when it is signaled by all the three main boundary cues pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. For eight-, but not for six-month-olds, the combination of pitch change and final lengthening, without the occurrence of a pause, is sufficient. This mirrors an adult-like perception by eight-months (Holzgrefe-Lang et al., 2016). Six-month-olds detect a prosodic phrase boundary signaled by final lengthening and pause. The findings suggest a developmental change in German prosodic boundary cue perception from a strong reliance on the pause cue at six months to a differentiated sensitivity to the more subtle cues pitch change and final lengthening at eight months. Neither for six- nor for eight-month-olds the occurrence of pitch change or final lengthening as single cues is sufficient, similar to what has been observed for adult speakers of German (Holzgrefe-Lang et al., 2016).
The present dissertation provides new scientific knowledge on infants’ sensitivity to individual prosodic phrase boundary cues in the first year of life. Methodologically, the studies are pathbreaking since they used exactly the same stimulus materials – phonologically thoroughly controlled lists of names – that have also been used with adults (Holzgrefe-Lang et al., 2016) and with infants in a neurophysiological paradigm (Holzgrefe-Lang, Wellmann, Höhle, & Wartenburger, 2018), allowing for comparisons across age (six/ eight months and adults) and method (behavioral vs. neurophysiological methods). Moreover, materials are suited to be transferred to other languages allowing for a crosslinguistic comparison. Taken together with a study with similar French materials (van Ommen et al., 2020) the observed change in sensitivity in German-learning infants can be interpreted as a language-specific one, from an initial language-general processing mechanism that primarily focuses on the presence of pauses to a language-specific processing that takes into account prosodic properties available in the ambient language. The developmental pattern is discussed as an interplay of acoustic salience, prosodic typology (prosodic regularity) and cue reliability.
N2 - Die Dissertation befasst sich mit der Bedeutung individueller prosodischer Hinweise für die Wahrnehmung einer prosodischen Phrasengrenze bei deutschsprachig aufwachsenden Säuglingen.
In drei Studien wurde mit behavioralen Untersuchungen der Frage nachgegangen, welche Bedeutung die akustischen Merkmale Tonhöhenveränderung, finale Dehnung und das Auftreten von Pausen für die Erkennung einer prosodischen Grenze haben. Zudem wurde hinterfragt, ob sich die Sensitivität für diese prosodischen Grenzmarkierungen im ersten Lebensjahr verändert und einer perzeptuellen Reorganisation, also einer Anpassung an die Muttersprache (Attunement Theorie, Aslin & Pisoni, 1980), unterliegt.
Mithilfe der Headturn Preference Procedure wurde getestet, ob 6 und 8 Monate alte Deutsch lernende Säuglinge zwei verschiedene prosodische Gruppierungen einer Aufzählung von Namen diskriminieren können (mit oder ohne eine interne prosodische Grenze, [Moni und Lilli] [und Manu] vs. [Moni und Lilli und Manu]). Die Grenze wurde bezüglich des Auftretens einzelner prosodischer Hinweise oder Kombinationen von Hinweisen systematisch variiert. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sowohl 6 als auch 8 Monate alte Deutsch lernende Säuglinge die interne prosodische Grenze in der Aufzählung erkennen, wenn sie durch alle drei Hinweise – Tonhöhenveränderung, finale Dehnung und das Auftreten einer Pause – markiert ist. Darüber hinaus zeigte sich, dass für 8, aber nicht für 6, Monate alte Säuglinge die Kombination aus Tonhöhe und finaler Dehnung ohne Pause ausreichend ist. 6 Monate alte Säuglinge erkennen eine Grenze, wenn sie durch eine Pause und finale Dehnung markiert ist. Damit zeigt sich eine Entwicklung der Sensitivität für prosodische Grenzmarkierungen von 6 zu 8 Monaten – weg von der Notwendigkeit der Pause hin zu einer differenzierten Wahrnehmung subtiler Hinweise wie Tonhöhe und finale Dehnung. Weder für 6 noch für 8 Monate alte Säuglinge ist die Markierung durch einen einzelnen Hinweis (Tonhöhe oder finale Dehnung) ausreichend. Dies deckt sich mit dem Verhaltensmuster erwachsener deutschsprachiger Hörer in einer Aufgabe zur prosodischen Strukturierung (Holzgrefe-Lang et al., 2016).
Die vorgelegte Dissertation beleuchtet erstmalig für den frühen Erwerb des Deutschen die Bedeutung einzelner prosodischer Hinweise an Phrasengrenzen. Hierbei ist die Art der verwendeten Stimuli neu: phonologisch sorgfältig kontrollierte Aufzählungen von Namen, in denen einzelne prosodische Hinweise fein akustisch manipuliert werden können. Zudem kann dieses Material ideal in Untersuchungen mit anderen Methoden (z.B. EEG) eingesetzt werden und auf weitere Altersgruppen (Erwachsene) und andere Sprachen transferiert werden. Dies ermöglicht den direkten Vergleich der Ergebnisse zu denen anderer Studien mit ähnlichem Stimulusmaterial (Holzgrefe-Lang et al., 2016, 2018; van Ommen et al., 2020) und erlaubt die Interpretation einer sprachspezifischen Entwicklung. Das beobachtete Entwicklungsmuster wird als Produkt eines Wechselspiels von akustischer Salienz, prosodischer Typologie (prosodische Regularität) und Zuverlässigkeit eines prosodischen Hinweises (cue reliability) diskutiert.
KW - prosody
KW - language acquisition
KW - infants
KW - prosodic boundary cues
KW - prosodic phrase boundary
KW - perceptual attunement
KW - Prosodie
KW - Spracherwerb
KW - Säuglinge
KW - prosodische Grenzmarkierungen
KW - prosodische Phrasengrenze
KW - perzeptuelle Reorganisation
Y1 - 2023
U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-573937
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Felser, Claudia
T1 - Do processing resource limitations shape heritage language grammars?
JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition
Y1 - 2019
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000397
SN - 1366-7289
SN - 1469-1841
VL - 23
IS - 1
SP - 23
EP - 24
PB - Cambridge University Press
CY - New York
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 - Schroeder, Christoph
T1 - The advanced acquisition of orthography in heritage Turkish in Germany
JF - Written language & literacy
N2 - The paper investigates Turkish texts from heritage speakers of Turkish in Germany in a pseudo-longitudinal setting, looking at pupils' texts from the 5th, 7th, 10th and 12th grades. Two types of dynamics are identified in the advanced acquisition(1) of Turkish orthography in the heritage context. One is the dynamic of language contact, where in certain areas of the orthography, we find a re-interpretation of Turkish principles according to the German model. However, this changes as the pupils grow up. The second dynamic is the heritage situation. The heritage situation on one side leads to the establishment of new practices, and it also leads to a higher degree of variability of spelling solutions in those areas, where the orthographic system of Turkish poses challenges to every writer, whether monolingual and growing up in Turkey or heritage speaker.
KW - Turkish
KW - heritage language
KW - orthography
KW - orthographic word
KW - advanced acquisition of
KW - language contact Turkish-German
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.00043.sch
SN - 1387-6732
SN - 1570-6001
VL - 23
IS - 2
SP - 251
EP - 271
PB - John Benjamins Publishing Co.
CY - Amsterdam
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 - Stede, Manfred
T1 - From connectives to coherence relations
BT - a case study of German contrastrive connectives
JF - Revue roumaine de linguistique : RRL = Romanian review of linguistics
N2 - The notion of coherence relations is quite widely accepted in general, but concrete proposals differ considerably on the questions of how they should be motivated, which relations are to be assumed, and how they should be defined. This paper takes a "bottom-up" perspective by assessing the contribution made by linguistic signals (connectives), using insights from the relevant literature as well as verification by practical text annotation. We work primarily with the German language here and focus on the realm of contrast. Thus, we suggest a new inventory of contrastive connective functions and discuss their relationship to contrastive coherence relations that have been proposed in earlier work.
KW - coherence relation
KW - connective
KW - contrast
KW - concession
KW - corpus analysis
Y1 - 2020
SN - 0035-3957
VL - 65
IS - 3
SP - 213
EP - 233
PB - Ed. Academiei Române
CY - Bucureşti
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 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - Using approximate Bayesian computation for estimating parameters in the cue-based retrieval model of sentence processing
JF - MethodsX
N2 - A commonly used approach to parameter estimation in computational models is the so-called grid search procedure: the entire parameter space is searched in small steps to determine the parameter value that provides the best fit to the observed data. This approach has several disadvantages: first, it can be computationally very expensive; second, one optimal point value of the parameter is reported as the best fit value; we cannot quantify our uncertainty about the parameter estimate. In the main journal article that this methods article accompanies (Jager et al., 2020, Interference patterns in subject-verb agreement and reflexives revisited: A large-sample study, Journal of Memory and Language), we carried out parameter estimation using Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), which is a Bayesian approach that allows us to quantify our uncertainty about the parameter's values given data. This customization has the further advantage that it allows us to generate both prior and posterior predictive distributions of reading times from the cue-based retrieval model of Lewis and Vasishth, 2005.
Instead of the conventional method of using grid search, we use Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) for parameter estimation in the [4] model.
The ABC method of parameter estimation has the advantage that the uncertainty of the parameter can be quantified.
KW - Bayesian parameter estimation
KW - Prior and posterior predictive
KW - distributions
KW - Psycholinguistics
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2020.100850
SN - 2215-0161
VL - 7
PB - Elsevier
CY - Amsterdam
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 - 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 - Engbert, Ralf
A1 - Rabe, Maximilian Michael
A1 - Schwetlick, Lisa
A1 - Seelig, Stefan A.
A1 - Reich, Sebastian
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - Data assimilation in dynamical cognitive science
JF - Trends in cognitive sciences
N2 - Dynamical models make specific assumptions about cognitive processes that generate human behavior. In data assimilation, these models are tested against timeordered data. Recent progress on Bayesian data assimilation demonstrates that this approach combines the strengths of statistical modeling of individual differences with the those of dynamical cognitive models.
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.11.006
SN - 1364-6613
SN - 1879-307X
VL - 26
IS - 2
SP - 99
EP - 102
PB - Elsevier
CY - Amsterdam
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 - 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 - 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 - Wulff, Peter
A1 - Buschhüter, David
A1 - Westphal, Andrea
A1 - Nowak, Anna
A1 - Becker, Lisa
A1 - Robalino, Hugo
A1 - Stede, Manfred
A1 - Borowski, Andreas
T1 - Computer-based classification of preservice physics teachers’ written reflections
JF - Journal of science education and technology
N2 - Reflecting in written form on one's teaching enactments has been considered a facilitator for teachers' professional growth in university-based preservice teacher education. Writing a structured reflection can be facilitated through external feedback. However, researchers noted that feedback in preservice teacher education often relies on holistic, rather than more content-based, analytic feedback because educators oftentimes lack resources (e.g., time) to provide more analytic feedback. To overcome this impediment to feedback for written reflection, advances in computer technology can be of use. Hence, this study sought to utilize techniques of natural language processing and machine learning to train a computer-based classifier that classifies preservice physics teachers' written reflections on their teaching enactments in a German university teacher education program. To do so, a reflection model was adapted to physics education. It was then tested to what extent the computer-based classifier could accurately classify the elements of the reflection model in segments of preservice physics teachers' written reflections. Multinomial logistic regression using word count as a predictor was found to yield acceptable average human-computer agreement (F1-score on held-out test dataset of 0.56) so that it might fuel further development towards an automated feedback tool that supplements existing holistic feedback for written reflections with data-based, analytic feedback.
KW - reflection
KW - teacher professional development
KW - hatural language
KW - processing
KW - machine learning
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-020-09865-1
SN - 1059-0145
SN - 1573-1839
VL - 30
IS - 1
SP - 1
EP - 15
PB - Springer
CY - Dordrecht
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Stede, Manfred
T1 - Automatic argumentation mining and the role of stance and sentiment
JF - Journal of argumentation in context
N2 - Argumentation mining is a subfield of Computational Linguistics that aims (primarily) at automatically finding arguments and their structural components in natural language text. We provide a short introduction to this field, intended for an audience with a limited computational background. After explaining the subtasks involved in this problem of deriving the structure of arguments, we describe two other applications that are popular in computational linguistics: sentiment analysis and stance detection. From the linguistic viewpoint, they concern the semantics of evaluation in language. In the final part of the paper, we briefly examine the roles that these two tasks play in argumentation mining, both in current practice, and in possible future systems.
KW - argumentation structure
KW - argumentation mining
KW - sentiment analysis
KW - stance detection
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/jaic.00006.ste
SN - 2211-4742
SN - 2211-4750
VL - 9
IS - 1
SP - 19
EP - 41
PB - John Benjamins Publishing Co.
CY - Amsterdam
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 - 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 - 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 - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris
T1 - Differences in processing times for distractors and pictures modulate the influence of distractors in picture-word interference tasks
JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2 - In the picture-word interference paradigm, participants name pictures while ignoring a distractor word. When targets and distractors share phonemic and/or graphemic content, naming latencies are shorter than when there is no overlap between the two words. This study examines the hypothesis that the facilitation effect is modulated by differences in the time it takes participants to encode the picture name and process the distractor. Participants named pictures while ignoring distractors that either shared a phonological/orthographical syllable with the target word or were unrelated to that word. Response latencies during the naming of the distractors were collected and used as a measure of distractor processing time. The facilitation effect in picture naming was modulated by differences in response times between the picture and word naming tasks. This finding complements previous studies in showing that picture naming processes in the picture-word interference paradigm are influenced by the time course of distractor processing.
KW - Picture-word interference
KW - inter-individual differences
KW - phonological facilitation
KW - reading performance
Y1 - 2016
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2016.1267783
SN - 2327-3798
SN - 2327-3801
VL - 32
IS - 1
SP - 709
EP - 723
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - Abingdon
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 - Martinez-Ferreiro, Silvia
A1 - Reyes, Andres Felipe
A1 - Bastiaanse, Roelien
T1 - Overcoming discourse-linking difficulties in aphasia
BT - the case of clitic pronouns
JF - Clinical linguistics & phonetics
N2 - The present study aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the impact of discourse-linking deficits on the performance of individuals with aphasia by providing new data from a set of rarely investigated constructions: sentences in which a clitic pronoun coexists alongside with the full DP it agrees with. To do so, we use data of individuals with non-fluent aphasias who need to overcome the difficulties in direct object (accusative) clitic production. This results in overproduction of non-target clitic right dislocations (RDs) and clitic doubling (CD). Data from 15 individual’s native speakers of Spanish and Catalan are discussed. Data complement the results of previous investigations on discourse-linking effects in these languages, allowing the interpretation of results across constructions.
KW - Clitic pronouns
KW - discourse
KW - aphasia
KW - Spanish
KW - Catalan
Y1 - 0207
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2017.1308015
SN - 0269-9206
SN - 1464-5076
VL - 31
IS - 6
SP - 459
EP - 477
PB - Taylor & Francis Group
CY - Philadelphia
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 - 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 - Smith, Garrett
A1 - Vasishth, Shravan
T1 - A principled approach to feature selection in models of sentence processing
JF - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society
N2 - Among theories of human language comprehension, cue-based memory retrieval has proven to be a useful framework for understanding when and how processing difficulty arises in the resolution of long-distance dependencies. Most previous work in this area has assumed that very general retrieval cues like [+subject] or [+singular] do the work of identifying (and sometimes misidentifying) a retrieval target in order to establish a dependency between words. However, recent work suggests that general, handpicked retrieval cues like these may not be enough to explain illusions of plausibility (Cunnings & Sturt, 2018), which can arise in sentences like The letter next to the porcelain plate shattered. Capturing such retrieval interference effects requires lexically specific features and retrieval cues, but handpicking the features is hard to do in a principled way and greatly increases modeler degrees of freedom. To remedy this, we use well-established word embedding methods for creating distributed lexical feature representations that encode information relevant for retrieval using distributed retrieval cue vectors. We show that the similarity between the feature and cue vectors (a measure of plausibility) predicts total reading times in Cunnings and Sturt's eye-tracking data. The features can easily be plugged into existing parsing models (including cue-based retrieval and self-organized parsing), putting very different models on more equal footing and facilitating future quantitative comparisons.
KW - Cue‐based retrieval
KW - plausibility
KW - word embeddings
KW - linguistic
KW - features
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12918
SN - 0364-0213
SN - 1551-6709
VL - 44
IS - 12
PB - Wiley
CY - Hoboken
ER -