TY - JOUR A1 - Arslan, Seçkin A1 - Gür, Eren A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Predicting the sources of impaired wh-question comprehension in non-fluent aphasia BT - a cross-linguistic machine learning study on Turkish and German JF - Cognitive neuropsychology N2 - This study investigates the comprehension of wh-questions in individuals with aphasia (IWA) speaking Turkish, a non-wh-movement language, and German, a wh-movement language. We examined six German-speaking and 11 Turkish-speaking IWA using picture-pointing tasks. Findings from our experiments show that the Turkish IWA responded more accurately to both object who and object which questions than to subject questions, while the German IWA performed better for subject which questions than in all other conditions. Using random forest models, a machine learning technique used in tree-structured classification, on the individual data revealed that both the Turkish and German IWA’s response accuracy is largely predicted by the presence of overt and unambiguous case marking. We discuss our results with regard to different theoretical approaches to the comprehension of wh-questions in aphasia. KW - Non-fluent aphasia KW - random forest algorithm KW - sentence comprehension KW - wh-in-situ KW - wh-questions KW - wh-movement Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2017.1394284 SN - 0264-3294 SN - 1464-0627 VL - 34 SP - 312 EP - 331 PB - Taylor & Francis CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Reifegerste, Jana A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Effects of Aging on Interference During Pronoun Resolution JF - Journal of speech, language, and hearing research N2 - Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of healthy aging on the ability to suppress grammatically illicit antecedents during pronoun resolution. Method: In 2 reading-based acceptability-judgment experiments, younger and older speakers of German read sentences containing an object pronoun and 2 potential antecedent noun phrases, only 1 of which was a grammatically licit antecedent. Using a gender-mismatch paradigm, we compared to what extent younger and older speakers were sensitive to feature (mis)matches between the pronoun and either of the 2 antecedents. All participants were fluent readers of German and had finished at least secondary education. Results: Experiment 1 used a self-paced reading paradigm. Older speakers showed greater sensitivity than younger ones to mismatching licit antecedents, but no group showed any evidence of interference from an intervening competitor antecedent. In Experiment 2, we increased the processing demand by using paced word-by-word stimulus presentation and longer sentences. Here, older participants showed reduced sensitivity, in comparison with younger people, to mismatching licit antecedents. Unlike our younger participants, they showed signs of distraction by the presence of a linearly closer but grammatically inappropriate antecedent when no appropriate antecedent was available. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1044/2017_JSLHR-L-17-0183 SN - 1092-4388 SN - 1558-9102 VL - 60 SP - 3573 EP - 3589 PB - American Speech-Language-Hearing Assoc. CY - Rockville ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Reifegerste, Jana A1 - Hauer, Franziska A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Agreement processing and attraction errors in aging BT - evidence from subject-verb agreement in German JF - Aging, neuropsychology, and cognition : a journal on normal and dysfunctional development N2 - Effects of aging on lexical processing are well attested, but the picture is less clear for grammatical processing. Where age differences emerge, these are usually ascribed to working-memory (WM) decline. Previous studies on the influence of WM on agreement computation have yielded inconclusive results, and work on aging and subject-verb agreement processing is lacking. In two experiments (Experiment 1: timed grammaticality judgment, Experiment 2: self-paced reading + WM test), we investigated older (OA) and younger (YA) adults’ susceptibility to agreement attraction errors. We found longer reading latencies and judgment reaction times (RTs) for OAs. Further, OAs, particularly those with low WM scores, were more accepting of sentences with attraction errors than YAs. OAs showed longer reading latencies for ungrammatical sentences, again modulated by WM, than YAs. Our results indicate that OAs have greater difficulty blocking intervening nouns from interfering with the computation of agreement dependencies. WM can modulate this effect. KW - Subject-verb agreement KW - attraction errors KW - aging KW - grammaticality judgment KW - self-paced reading Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13825585.2016.1251550 SN - 1382-5585 SN - 1744-4128 VL - 24 IS - 6 SP - 672 EP - 702 PB - Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boxell, Oliver A1 - Felser, Claudia A1 - Cunnings, Ian T1 - Antecedent contained deletions in native and non-native sentence processing JF - Linguistic approaches to bilingualism N2 - We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring study investigating native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers’ real-time processing of antecedent-contained deletion (ACD), a type of verb phrase ellipsis in which the ellipsis gap forms part of its own antecedent. The resulting interpretation problem is traditionally thought to be solved by quantifier raising, a covert scope-shifting operation that serves to remove the gap from within its antecedent. Our L2 group comprised advanced, native German-speaking L2 learners of English. The analysis of the eye-movement data showed that both L1 and L2 English speakers tried to recover the missing verb phrase after encountering the gap. Only the native speakers showed evidence of ellipsis resolution being affected by quantification, however. No effects of quantification following gap detection were found in the L2 group, by contrast, indicating that recovery of the elided material was accomplished independently from the object’s quantificational status in this group. KW - L2 processing KW - eye-movement monitoring KW - antecedent contained deletion Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15006.box SN - 1879-9264 SN - 1879-9272 VL - 7 IS - 5 SP - 554 EP - 582 PB - John Benjamins Publishing Co. CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Reifegerste, Jana A1 - Meyer, Antje A1 - Zwitserlood, Pienie T1 - Inflectional complexity and experience affect plural processing in younger and older readers of Dutch and German JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience N2 - According to dual-route models of morphological processing, regular inflections can be retrieved as whole-word forms or decomposed into morphemes. Baayen, Dijkstra, and Schreuder [(1997). Singulars and plurals in Dutch: Evidence for a parallel dual-route model. Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 94–117. doi:10.1006/jmla.1997.2509] proposed a dual-route model in which singular-dominant plurals (“brides”) are decomposed, while plural-dominant plurals (“peas”) are accessed as whole-word units. We report two lexical-decision experiments investigating how plural processing is influenced by participants’ age and morphological complexity of the language (German/Dutch). For all Dutch participants and older German participants, we replicated the interaction between number and dominance reported by Baayen and colleagues. Younger German participants showed a main effect of number, indicating decomposition of all plurals. Access to stored forms seems to depend on morphological richness and experience with word forms. The data pattern fits neither full-decomposition nor full-storage models, but is compatible with dual-route models. KW - Morphological processing KW - morphological complexity KW - ageing KW - lexical decision KW - plural processing Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2016.1247213 SN - 2327-3798 SN - 2327-3801 VL - 32 IS - 4 SP - 471 EP - 487 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boxell, Oliver A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Sensitivity to parasitic gaps inside subject islands in native and non-native sentence processing JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition. KW - Parasitic gaps KW - island constraints KW - bilingual sentence processing KW - eye-movement monitoring KW - English Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728915000942 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 20 SP - 494 EP - 511 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER -