TY - JOUR A1 - Omane, Paul Okyere A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Acquiring syntactic variability BT - The production of Wh-questions in children and adults speaking Akan JF - Frontiers in communication N2 - This paper investigates the predictions of the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis by studying the acquisition of wh-questions in 4- and 5-year-old Akan-speaking children in an experimental approach using an elicited production and an elicited imitation task. Akan has two types of wh-question structures (wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions), which allows an investigation of children’s acquisition of these two question structures and their preferences for one or the other. Our results show that adults prefer to use wh-ex-situ questions over wh-in-situ questions. The results from the children show that both age groups have the two question structures in their linguistic repertoire. However, they differ in their preferences in usage in the elicited production task: while the 5-year-olds preferred the wh-in-situ structure over the wh-ex-situ structure, the 4-year-olds showed a selective preference for the wh-in-situ structure in who-questions. These findings suggest a developmental change in wh-question preferences in Akan-learning children between 4 and 5 years of age with a so far unobserved u-shaped developmental pattern. In the elicited imitation task, all groups showed a strong tendency to maintain the structure of in-situ and ex-situ questions in repeating grammatical questions. When repairing ungrammatical ex-situ questions, structural changes to grammatical in-situ questions were hardly observed but the insertion of missing morphemes while keeping the ex-situ structure. Together, our findings provide only partial support for the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis. KW - Akan KW - wh-questions KW - wh-in-situ KW - wh-ex-situ KW - derivational complexity KW - language acquisition Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.604951 SN - 2297-900X VL - 2021 PB - Frontiers Media CY - Lausanne, Schweiz ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Watermeyer, Melanie A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Kauschke, Christina T1 - Ausagieren von Sätzen versus Satz-Bild-Zuordnung BT - Vergleich zweier Methoden zur Untersuchung des Sprachverständnisses anhand von semantisch reversiblen Sätzen mit Objektvoranstellung bei drei- und fünfjährigen Kindern JF - Spektrum Patholinguistik Y1 - 2011 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-54374 SN - 1869-3822 SN - 1866-9433 IS - 4 SP - 237 EP - 246 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen A1 - Kiefer, Dorothea A1 - Schulz, Antje A1 - Schmitz, Michaela T1 - Functional elements in infants’ speech processing : the role of determiners in the syntactic categorization of lexical elements N2 - How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words. Evidence from the head-turn preference paradigm shows that, although 12- to 13-month-olds cannot do this, 14- to 16-month-olds are able to use a determiner to categorize a following novel word as a noun. In contrast, no categorization effect was found for a novel word following a subject pronoun. To understand this difference we analyzed adult child-directed speech. This analysis showed that there are in fact stronger co-occurrence relations between determiners and nouns than between subject pronouns and verbs. Thus, in German determiners may be more reliable cues to the syntactic category of an adjacent novel word than are subject pronouns. We propose that the capacity to syntactically categorize novel words, demonstrated here for the first time in children this young, mediates between the recognition of the specific morphosyntactic frame in which a novel word appears and the word-to-world mapping that is needed to build up a semantic representation for the novel word. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - paper 023 Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-16285 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Schmitz, Michaela A1 - Müller, Anja A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - The recognition of discontinuous verbal dependencies by German 19-month-olds : evidence for lexical and structural influences on children’s early processing capacities N2 - Recent work has shown that English-learning 18-month-olds can detect the relationship between discontinuous morphemes such as is and -ing in Grandma is always running (Gomez, 2002; Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998) but only at a maximum of 3 intervening syllables. In this article we examine the tracking of discontinuous dependencies in children acquiring German. Due to freer word order, German allows for greater distances between dependent elements and a greater syntactic variety of the intervening elements than English does. The aim of this study was to investigate whether factors other than distance may influence the child’s capacity to recognize discontinuous elements. Our findings provide evidence that children’s recognition capacities are affected not only by distance but also by their ability to linguistically analyze the material intervening between the dependent elements. We speculate that this result supports the existence of processing mechanisms that reduce a discontinuous relation to a local one based on subcategorization relations. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - paper 024 Y1 - 2006 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-16297 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - van de Vijver, Ruben A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - Word processing at 19 months and its relation to language performance at 30 months : a retrospective analysis of data from German learning children N2 - Recent research has shown that the early lexical representations children establish in their second year of life already seem to be phonologically detailed enough to allow differentiation from very similar forms. In contrast to these findings children with specific language impairment show problems in discriminating phonologically similar word forms up to school age. In our study we investigated the question whether there would be differences in the processing of phonological details in normally developing and in children with low language performance in the second year of life. This was done by a retrospective study in which in the processing of phonological details was tested by a preferential looking experiment when the children were 19 months old. At the age of 30 months children were tested with a standardized German test of language comprehension and production (SETK2). The preferential looking data at 19 months revealed an opposite reaction pattern for the two groups: while the children scoring normally in the SETK2 increase their fixations of a pictured object only when it was named with the correct word, children with later low language performance did so only when presented with a phonologically slightly deviant mispronunciation. We suggest that this pattern does not point to a specific deficit in processing phonological information in these children but might be related to an instability of early phonological representations, and/or a generalized problem of information processing as compared to typically developing children. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - paper 025 KW - Word processing KW - late talker KW - early indicators for SLI KW - processing of phonological details Y1 - 2006 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-16302 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Omane, Paul Okyere A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Acquiring Syntactic Variability: The Production of Wh-Questions in Children and Adults Speaking Akan T2 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - This paper investigates the predictions of the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis by studying the acquisition of wh-questions in 4- and 5-year-old Akan-speaking children in an experimental approach using an elicited production and an elicited imitation task. Akan has two types of wh-question structures (wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions), which allows an investigation of children’s acquisition of these two question structures and their preferences for one or the other. Our results show that adults prefer to use wh-ex-situ questions over wh-in-situ questions. The results from the children show that both age groups have the two question structures in their linguistic repertoire. However, they differ in their preferences in usage in the elicited production task: while the 5-year-olds preferred the wh-in-situ structure over the wh-ex-situ structure, the 4-year-olds showed a selective preference for the wh-in-situ structure in who-questions. These findings suggest a developmental change in wh-question preferences in Akan-learning children between 4 and 5 years of age with a so far unobserved u-shaped developmental pattern. In the elicited imitation task, all groups showed a strong tendency to maintain the structure of in-situ and ex-situ questions in repeating grammatical questions. When repairing ungrammatical ex-situ questions, structural changes to grammatical in-situ questions were hardly observed but the insertion of missing morphemes while keeping the ex-situ structure. Together, our findings provide only partial support for the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 738 KW - Akan KW - wh-questions KW - wh-in-situ KW - wh-ex-situ KW - derivational complexity KW - language acquisition Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-536867 SN - 1866-8364 SP - 1 EP - 15 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Marimon Tarter, Mireia A1 - Hofmann, Andrea A1 - Veríssimo, Joao Marques A1 - Männel, Claudia A1 - Friederici, Angela Dorkas A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell T1 - Children’s Learning of Non-adjacent Dependencies Using a Web-Based Computer Game Setting JF - Frontiers in Psychology N2 - Infants show impressive speech decoding abilities and detect acoustic regularities that highlight the syntactic relations of a language, often coded via non-adjacent dependencies (NADs, e.g., is singing). It has been claimed that infants learn NADs implicitly and associatively through passive listening and that there is a shift from effortless associative learning to a more controlled learning of NADs after the age of 2 years, potentially driven by the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. To investigate if older children are able to learn NADs, Lammertink et al. (2019) recently developed a word-monitoring serial reaction time (SRT) task and could show that 6–11-year-old children learned the NADs, as their reaction times (RTs) increased then they were presented with violated NADs. In the current study we adapted their experimental paradigm and tested NAD learning in a younger group of 52 children between the age of 4–8 years in a remote, web-based, game-like setting (whack-a-mole). Children were exposed to Italian phrases containing NADs and had to monitor the occurrence of a target syllable, which was the second element of the NAD. After exposure, children did a “Stem Completion” task in which they were presented with the first element of the NAD and had to choose the second element of the NAD to complete the stimuli. Our findings show that, despite large variability in the data, children aged 4–8 years are sensitive to NADs; they show the expected differences in r RTs in the SRT task and could transfer the NAD-rule in the Stem Completion task. We discuss these results with respect to the development of NAD dependency learning in childhood and the practical impact and limitations of collecting these data in a web-based setting. KW - non-adjacent dependencies KW - rule learning KW - web-based KW - implicit learning KW - serial reaction time (SRT) task KW - SRT Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.734877 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 12 SP - 1 EP - 15 PB - Frontiers CY - Lausanne, Schweiz ER -