TY - JOUR A1 - Wittenberg, Eva A1 - Paczynski, Martin A1 - Wiese, Heike A1 - Jackendoff, Ray A1 - Kuperberg, Gina T1 - The difference between "giving a rose" and "giving a kiss": Sustained neural activity to the light verb construction JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms associated with processing light verb constructions such as "give a kiss". These constructions consist of a semantically underspecified light verb ("give") and an event nominal that contributes most of the meaning and also activates an argument structure of its own ("kiss"). This creates a mismatch between the syntactic constituents and the semantic roles of a sentence. Native speakers read German verb-final sentences that contained light verb constructions (e.g., "Julius gave Anne a kiss"), non-light constructions (e.g., "Julius gave Anne a rose"), and semantically anomalous constructions (e.g., 'Julius gave Anne a conversation"). ERPs were measured at the critical verb, which appeared after all its arguments. Compared to non-light constructions, the light verb constructions evoked a widely distributed, frontally focused, sustained negative-going effect between 500 and 900 ms after verb onset. We interpret this effect as reflecting working memory costs associated with complex semantic processes that establish a shared argument structure in the light verb constructions. KW - Event-related potential KW - Sentence processing KW - Light verb constructions KW - Argument structure KW - Syntax-semantics interface KW - Sustained negativity Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2014.02.002 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 73 SP - 31 EP - 42 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Brandt-Kobele, Oda-Christina A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - The detection of subject-verb agreement violations by German-speaking children: An eye-tracking study JF - Lingua : international review of general linguistics N2 - This study examines the processing of sentences with and without subject verb agreement violations in German-speaking children at three and five years of age. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to measure whether children's looking behavior was influenced by the grammaticality of the test sentences. The older group of children turned their gaze faster towards a target picture and looked longer at it when the object noun referring to the target was presented in a grammatical sentence with subject verb agreement compared to when the object noun was presented in a sentence in which an agreement violation occurred. The younger group of children displayed less conclusive results, with a tendency to look longer but not faster towards the target picture in the grammatical compared to the ungrammatical condition. This is the first experimental evidence that German-speaking five-year old children are sensitive to subject verb agreement and violations thereof. Our results additionally substantiate that the eye-tracking paradigm is suitable to examine children's sensitivity to subtle grammatical violations. KW - Subject-verb agreement KW - Eye-tracking KW - Language acquisition KW - German Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2013.12.008 SN - 0024-3841 SN - 1872-6135 VL - 144 SP - 7 EP - 20 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bamyaci, Elif A1 - Haeussler, Jana A1 - Kabak, Baris T1 - The interaction of animacy and number agreement: an experimental investigation JF - Lingua : international review of general linguistics N2 - This paper investigates subject verb agreement in Turkish with particular focus on the role the animacy of plural subjects plays in verbal number marking. Previous descriptive grammars of Turkish (e.g., Sezer, 1978) report an asymmetry in number marking for plural subjects: if the plural subject denotes an animate entity, both plural and singular verbs are possible, whereas only singular verbs are possible when the plural subject denotes an inanimate entity. Using the magnitude estimation method, we measured the well-formedness of simple Turkish sentences consisting of a plural subject and a verb in two groups of participants that differ only in age (mean: 28 years old and 43 years old). The overall results provide an empirical validation of the proposed split between animate and inanimate subjects and suggest that the acceptability of plural agreement is sensitive to even more fine-grained distinctions of animacy. In particular, the plural dispreference was reduced for inanimates with a teleological capacity (in the sense of Folli and Harley, 2008) and for body parts, in comparison to true inanimates (e.g., furniture and clothes). Accordingly, we propose an animacy hierarchy for Turkish that is in line with typological observations (e.g., Corbett, 2000, 2006) and augment it with a further distinction between quasi-animates and inanimates. Although less pronounced in sentences with animate subjects, we observed a higher preference for singular verbs over plural verbs across all conditions. This suggests that the singular marking on the verb, which is zero marked in Turkish, is the default. Furthermore, we find a significant effect of age: in the older group, the singular preference is less pronounced across the conditions and almost absent in sentences with an animate subject. Moreover, the older participants made finer distinctions in the animacy hierarchy, further differentiating between two types of quasi-animates (teleologically capable entities vs. entities with inherited animacy). The two generations in our study share the animate inanimate split as well as the sharp contrast between singular and plural agreement in sentences with inanimate subjects; they differ, however, in degree of optionality. Altogether, these results suggest a decrease in the degree of optionality across generations. As in research on language attrition and bilingualism (Hulk and Muller, 2000; Muller and Hulk, 2001; Sorace, 2011), the results accord with the idea that interface phenomena are vulnerable to change; however, non-convergence between generations in our study stemmed from areas that yield gradient rather than categorical results. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. KW - Subject verb agreement in Turkish KW - Number marking KW - Animacy KW - Optionality KW - Gradience KW - Semantics morphosyntax interface KW - Language change Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.06.005 SN - 0024-3841 SN - 1872-6135 VL - 148 SP - 254 EP - 277 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Clackson, Kaili A1 - Heyer, Vera T1 - Reflexive anaphor resolution in spoken language comprehension: structural constraints and beyond JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - We report results from an eye-tracking during listening study examining English-speaking adults' online processing of reflexive pronouns, and specifically whether the search for an antecedent is restricted to syntactically appropriate positions. Participants listened to a short story where the recipient of an object was introduced with a reflexive, and were asked to identify the object recipient as quickly as possible. This allowed for the recording of participants' offline interpretation of the reflexive, response times, and eye movements on hearing the reflexive. Whilst our offline results show that the ultimate interpretation for reflexives was constrained by binding principles, the response time, and eye-movement data revealed that during processing participants were temporarily distracted by a structurally inappropriate competitor antecedent when this was prominent in the discourse. These results indicate that in addition to binding principles, online referential decisions are also affected by discourse-level information. KW - binding principle A KW - reflexive resolution KW - discourse prominence KW - sentence processing KW - eye-tracking Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00904 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 5 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Kager, Rene T1 - OCP-Place in speech segmentation JF - Language and speech N2 - OCP-Place, a cross-linguistically well-attested constraint against pairs of consonants with shared [place], is psychologically real. Studies have shown that the processing of words violating OCP-Place is inhibited. Functionalists assume that OCP arises as a consequence of low-level perception: a consonant following another with the same [place] cannot be faithfully perceived as an independent unit. If functionalist theories were correct, then lexical access would be inhibited if two homorganic consonants conjoin at word boundaries-a problem that can only be solved with lexical feedback. Here, we experimentally challenge the functional account by showing that OCP-Place can be used as a speech segmentation cue during pre-lexical processing without lexical feedback, and that the use relates to distributions in the input. In Experiment 1, native listeners of Dutch located word boundaries between two labials when segmenting an artificial language. This indicates a use of OCP-Labial as a segmentation cue, implying a full perception of both labials. Experiment 2 shows that segmentation performance cannot solely be explained by well-formedness intuitions. Experiment 3 shows that knowledge of OCP-Place depends on language-specific input: in Dutch, co-occurrences of labials are under-represented, but co-occurrences of coronals are not. Accordingly, Dutch listeners fail to use OCP-Coronal for segmentation. KW - Artificial language learning KW - OCP-Place KW - phonotactics KW - speech segmentation KW - pre-lexical processing Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830913508074 SN - 0023-8309 SN - 1756-6053 VL - 57 IS - 3 SP - 394 EP - 421 PB - Sage Publ. CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Clahsen, Harald A1 - Rothweiler, Monika A1 - Sterner, Franziska A1 - Chilla, Solveig T1 - Linguistic markers of specific language impairment in bilingual children: the case of verb morphology JF - Clinical linguistics & phonetics KW - Bilingualism KW - German KW - morphology KW - SLI KW - Turkish Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3109/02699206.2014.886726 SN - 0269-9206 SN - 1464-5076 VL - 28 IS - 9 SP - 709 EP - 721 PB - Taylor & Francis Group CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kupetz, Maxi T1 - Empathy displays as interactional achievements-Multimodal and sequential aspects JF - Journal of pragmatics : an interdisciplinary journal of language studies KW - Empathy KW - Understanding KW - Affectivity KW - Conversation Analysis KW - Interactional Linguistics KW - Multimodality Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.11.006 SN - 0378-2166 SN - 1879-1387 VL - 61 SP - 4 EP - 34 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Husain, Samar A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Srinivasan, Narayanan T1 - Strong expectations cancel locality effects: Evidence from Hindi JF - PLoS one N2 - Expectation-driven facilitation (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and locality-driven retrieval difficulty (Gibson, 1998, 2000; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) are widely recognized to be two critical factors in incremental sentence processing; there is accumulating evidence that both can influence processing difficulty. However, it is unclear whether and how expectations and memory interact. We first confirm a key prediction of the expectation account: a Hindi self-paced reading study shows that when an expectation for an upcoming part of speech is dashed, building a rarer structure consumes more processing time than building a less rare structure. This is a strong validation of the expectation-based account. In a second study, we show that when expectation is strong, i.e., when a particular verb is predicted, strong facilitation effects are seen when the appearance of the verb is delayed; however, when expectation is weak, i.e., when only the part of speech "verb' is predicted but a particular verb is not predicted, the facilitation disappears and a tendency towards a locality effect is seen. The interaction seen between expectation strength and distance shows that strong expectations cancel locality effects, and that weak expectations allow locality effects to emerge. Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0100986 SN - 1932-6203 VL - 9 IS - 7 PB - PLoS CY - San Fransisco ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bos, Laura S. A1 - Hanne, Sandra A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Bastiaanse, Roelien T1 - Losing track of time? Processing of time reference inflection in agrammatic and healthy speakers of German JF - Neuropsychologia : an international journal in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience N2 - Background: Individuals with agrammatic aphasia (IWAs) have problems with grammatical decoding of tense inflection. However, these difficulties depend on the time frame that the tense refers to. Verb morphology with reference to the past is more difficult than with reference to the non-past, because a link needs to be made to the past event in discourse, as captured in the PAst Discourse Linking Hypothesis (PADILIH; Bastiaanse, R., Bamyaci, E., Hsu, C., Lee, J., Yarbay Duman, T., Thompson, C. K., 2011. Time reference in agrammatic aphasia: A cross-linguistic study. J. Neurolinguist. 24, 652-673). With respect to reference to the (non-discourse-linked) future, data so far indicate that IWAs experience less difficulties as compared to past time reference (Bastiaanse, R., Bamyaci, E., Hsu, C., Lee, J., Yarbay Duman, T., Thompson, C. K., 2011. Time reference in agrammatic aphasia: A cross-linguistic study. J. Neurolinguist. 24, 652-673), supporting the assumptions of the PADILIH. Previous online studies of time reference in aphasia used methods such as reaction times analysis (e.g., Faroqi-Shah, Y., Dickey, M. W., 2009. On-line processing of tense and temporality in agrammatic aphasia. Brain Lang. 108, 97-111). So far, no such study used eye-tracking, even though this technique can bring additional insights (Burchert, F., Hanne, S., Vasishth, S., 2013. Sentence comprehension disorders in aphasia: the concept of chance performance revisited. Aphasiology 27, 112-125, doi:10.1080/02687038.2012.730603). Aims: This study investigated (1) whether processing of future and past time reference inflection differs between non-brain-damaged individuals (NBDs) and IWAs, and (2) underlying mechanisms of time reference comprehension failure by IWAs. Results and discussion: NBDs scored at ceiling and significantly higher than the IWAs. IWAs had below-ceiling performance on the future condition, and both participant groups were faster to respond to the past than to the future condition. These differences are attributed to a pre-existing preference to look at a past picture, which has to be overcome. Eye movement patterns suggest that both groups interpret future time reference similarly, while IWAs show a delay relative to NBDs in interpreting past time reference inflection. The eye tracking results support the PADILIH, because processing reference to the past in discourse syntax requires additional resources and thus, is problematic and delayed for people with aphasia. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. KW - Visual-world paradigm KW - Spoken language comprehension KW - Time reference KW - Morphology KW - Agrammatism KW - Eye-tracking KW - Aphasia KW - Discourse linking Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.10.026 SN - 0028-3932 SN - 1873-3514 VL - 65 SP - 180 EP - 190 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Passow, Susanne A1 - Westerhausen, Rene A1 - Hugdahl, Kenneth A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Heekeren, Hauke R. A1 - Lindenberger, Ulman A1 - Li, Shu-Chen T1 - Electrophysiological correlates of adult age differences in attentional control of auditory processing JF - Cerebral cortex N2 - In addition to sensory decline, age-related losses in auditory perception also reflect impairments in attentional modulation of perceptual saliency. Using an attention and intensity-modulated dichotic listening paradigm, we investigated electrophysiological correlates of processing conflicts between attentional focus and perceptual saliency in 25 younger and 26 older adults. Participants were instructed to attend to the right or left ear, and perceptual saliency was manipulated by varying the intensities of both ears. Attentional control demand was higher in conditions when attentional focus and perceptual saliency favored opposing ears than in conditions without such conflicts. Relative to younger adults, older adults modulated their attention less flexibly and were more influenced by perceptual saliency. Our results show, for the first time, that in younger adults a late negativity in the event-related potential (ERP) at fronto-central and parietal electrodes was sensitive to perceptual-attentional conflicts during auditory processing (N450 modulation effect). Crucially, the magnitude of the N450 modulation effect correlated positively with task performance. In line with lower attentional flexibility, the ERP waveforms of older adults showed absence of the late negativity and the modulation effect. This suggests that aging compromises the activation of the frontoparietal attentional network when processing the competing and conflicting auditory information. KW - aging KW - attention KW - auditory perception KW - conflict monitoring KW - ERP Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhs306 SN - 1047-3211 SN - 1460-2199 VL - 24 IS - 1 SP - 249 EP - 260 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Cary ER -