TY - GEN A1 - Festman, Julia A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - How Germans prepare for the English past tense BT - silent production of inflected words during EEG T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Processes involved in late bilinguals' production of morphologically complex words were studied using an event-related brain potentials (ERP) paradigm in which EEGs were recorded during participants' silent productions of English past- and present-tense forms. Twenty-three advanced second language speakers of English (first language [L1] German) were compared to a control group of 19 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found a frontocentral negativity for regular relative to irregular past-tense forms (e.g., asked vs. held) during (silent) production, and no difference for the present-tense condition (e.g., asks vs. holds), replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. This ERP effect suggests that combinatorial processing is involved in producing regular past-tense forms, in both late bilinguals and L1 speakers. We also suggest that this paradigm is a useful tool for future studies of online language production. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 504 KW - morphologically complex words KW - masked priming experiments KW - brain potentials KW - speech production KW - time-course KW - language production KW - electrophysiological evidence KW - late bilinguals KW - lexical access KW - 2nd-language Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-413678 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 504 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Clahsen, Harald A1 - Hansen, Detlef T1 - Profiling linguistic disability in German-speaking children JF - Assessing Grammar : the Languages of LARSP Y1 - 2012 SN - 978-1-8476-9639-7 U6 - https://doi.org/10.21832/9781847696397-007 SP - 77 EP - 91 PB - Multilingual Matters CY - Bristol ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ruberg, Tobias A1 - Rothweiler, Monika A1 - Veríssimo, João Marques A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Childhood bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment BT - A study of the CP-domain in German SLI JF - Bilingualism: Language and Cognition N2 - This study addresses the question of whether and how growing up with more than one language shapes a child's language impairment. Our focus is on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual (Turkish-German) children. We specifically investigated a range of phenomena related to the so-called CP (Complementizer Phrase) in German, the hierarchically highest layer of syntactic clause structure, which has been argued to be particularly affected in children with SLI. Spontaneous speech data were examined from bilingual children with SLI in comparison to two comparison groups: (i) typically-developing bilingual children, (ii) monolingual children with SLI. We found that despite persistent difficulty with subject-verb agreement, the two groups of children with SLI did not show any impairment of the CP-domain. We conclude that while subject-verb agreement is a suitable linguistic marker of SLI in German-speaking children, for both monolingual and bilingual ones, 'vulnerability of the CP-domain' is not. KW - developmental language impairment KW - specific language impairment KW - child second language acquisition KW - syntax KW - agreement Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000580 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 23 IS - 3 SP - 668 EP - 680 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - GEN A1 - Felser, Claudia A1 - Cunnings, Ian A1 - Batterham, Claire A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - The timing of island effects in nonnative sentence processing T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Using the eye-movement monitoring technique in two reading comprehension experiments, this study investigated the timing of constraints on wh-dependencies (so-called island constraints) in first- and second-language (L1 and L2) sentence processing. The results show that both L1 and L2 speakers of English are sensitive to extraction islands during processing, suggesting that memory storage limitations affect L1 and L2 comprehenders in essentially the same way. Furthermore, these results show that the timing of island effects in L1 compared to L2 sentence comprehension is affected differently by the type of cue (semantic fit versus filled gaps) signaling whether dependency formation is possible at a potential gap site. Even though L1 English speakers showed immediate sensitivity to filled gaps but not to lack of semantic fit, proficient German-speaking learners of English as a L2 showed the opposite sensitivity pattern. This indicates that initial wh-dependency formation in L2 processing is based on semantic feature matching rather than being structurally mediated as in L1 comprehension. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 526 KW - trace positions KW - empty categories KW - garden-paths KW - 2nd-language KW - grammar KW - dependencies KW - plausibility KW - constraints KW - english KW - comprehension Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-415179 SN - 1866-8364 EP - 526 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Krause, Helena A1 - Bosch, Sina A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Morphosyntax in the bilingual mental lexicon BT - an experimental study of strong stems in German T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Although morphosyntax has been identified as a major source of difficulty for adult (nonnative) language learners, most previous studies have examined a limited set of largely affix-based phenomena. Little is known about word-based morphosyntax in late bilinguals and of how morphosyntax is represented and processed in a nonnative speaker's lexicon. To address these questions, we report results from two behavioral experiments investigating stem variants of strong verbs in German (which encode features such as tense, person, and number) in groups of advanced adult learners as well as native speakers of German. Although the late bilinguals were highly proficient in German, the results of a lexical priming experiment revealed clear native-nonnative differences. We argue that lexical representation and processing relies less on morphosyntactic information in a nonnative than in a native language. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 520 KW - morphological structure KW - 2nd-language grammar KW - inflected nouns KW - ER-FMRI KW - representation KW - sensitivity KW - violations KW - acquisition KW - agreement KW - learners Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-414431 IS - 520 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bosch, Sina A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Accessing morphosyntax in L1 and L2 word recognition A priming study of inflected German adjectives JF - The mental lexicon N2 - In fusional languages, inflectional affixes may encode multiple morphosyntactic features such as case, number, and gender. To determine how these features are accessed during both native (L1) and non-native (L2) word recognition, the present study compares the results from a masked visual priming experiment testing inflected adjectives of German to those of a previous overt (cross-modal) priming experiment on the same phenomenon. While for the L1 group both experiments produced converging results, a group of highly-proficient Russian L2 learners of German showed native-like modulations of repetition priming effects under overt, but not under masked priming conditions. These results indicate that not only affixes but also their morphosyntactic features are accessible during initial form-based lexical access, albeit only for L1 and not for L2 processing. We argue that this contrast is in line with other findings suggesting that non-native language processing is less influenced by structural information than the L1. KW - morphosyntax KW - inflection KW - masked priming KW - late bilinguals Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.11.1.02bos SN - 1871-1340 SN - 1871-1375 VL - 11 SP - 26 EP - 54 PB - John Benjamins Publishing Co. CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - GEN A1 - Clahsen, Harald A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Some notes on the shallow structure hypothesis T2 - Studies in second language acquisition N2 - Since the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) was first put forward in 2006, it has inspired a growing body of research on grammatical processing in nonnative (L2) speakers. More than 10 years later, we think it is time for the SSH to be reconsidered in the light of new empirical findings and current theoretical assumptions about human language processing. The purpose of our critical commentary is twofold: to clarify some issues regarding the SSH and to sketch possible ways in which this hypothesis might be refined and improved to better account for L1 and L2 speakers’ performance patterns. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263117000250 SN - 0272-2631 SN - 1470-1545 VL - 40 IS - 3 SP - 693 EP - 706 PB - Cambridge University Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bosch, Sina A1 - Verissimo, Joao Marques A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Inflectional morphology in bilingual language processing BT - An age-of-acquisition study JF - Language acquisition : a journal of developmental linguistics N2 - This study addresses the question of how age of acquisition (AoA) affects grammatical processing, specifically with respect to inflectional morphology, in bilinguals. We examined experimental data of more than 100 participants from the Russian/German community in Berlin, all of whom acquired Russian from birth and German at different ages. Using the cross-modal lexical priming technique, we investigated stem allomorphs of German verbs that encode multiple morphosyntactic features. The results revealed a striking AoA modulation of observed priming patterns, indicating efficient access to morphosyntactic features for early AoAs and a gradual decline with increasing AoAs. In addition, we found a discontinuity in the function relating AoA to morphosyntactic feature access, suggesting a sensitive period for the development of morphosyntax. Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2019.1570204 SN - 1048-9223 SN - 1532-7817 VL - 26 IS - 3 SP - 339 EP - 360 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Krause, Helena A1 - Bosch, Sina A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Morphosyntax in the bilingual mental lexicon : An Experimental Study of Strong Stems in German JF - Studies in second language acquisition Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263114000564 SN - 0272-2631 SN - 1470-1545 VL - 37 IS - 4 SP - 597 EP - 621 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Felser, Claudia A1 - Cunnings, Ian A1 - Batterham, Claire A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - The timing of Island effects in nonnative sentence processing JF - Studies in second language acquisition N2 - Using the eye-movement monitoring technique in two reading comprehension experiments, this study investigated the timing of constraints on wh-dependencies (so-called island constraints) in first- and second-language (L1 and L2) sentence processing. The results show that both L1 and L2 speakers of English are sensitive to extraction islands during processing, suggesting that memory storage limitations affect L1 and L2 comprehenders in essentially the same way. Furthermore, these results show that the timing of island effects in L1 compared to L2 sentence comprehension is affected differently by the type of cue (semantic fit versus filled gaps) signaling whether dependency formation is possible at a potential gap site. Even though L1 English speakers showed immediate sensitivity to filled gaps but not to lack of semantic fit, proficient German-speaking learners of English as a L2 showed the opposite sensitivity pattern. This indicates that initial wh-dependency formation in L2 processing is based on semantic feature matching rather than being structurally mediated as in L1 comprehension. KW - trace positions KW - empty categories KW - garden-paths KW - 2nd-language KW - grammar KW - dependencies KW - plausibility KW - constraints KW - english KW - comprehension Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263111000507 SN - 0272-2631 VL - 34 IS - 1 SP - 67 EP - 98 PB - Cambridge University Press CY - Cambridge ER -