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A form-function mismatch?
(2019)
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.
Children born preterm are at higher risk to develop language deficits. Auditory speech discrimination deficits may be early signs for language developmental problems. The present study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate neural speech discrimination in 15 preterm infants at term-equivalent age compared to 15 full term neonates. The full term group revealed a significantly greater hemodynamic response to forward compared to backward speech within the left hemisphere extending from superior temporal to inferior parietal and middle and inferior frontal areas. In contrast, the preterm group did not show differences in their hemodynamic responses during forward versus backward speech, thus, they did not discriminate speech from nonspeech. Groups differed significantly in their responses to forward speech, whereas they did not differ in their responses to backward speech. The significant differences between groups point to an altered development of the functional network underlying language acquisition in preterm infants as early as in term-equivalent age.
Accusative Unaccusatives
(2019)
Alcohol in the aging brain
(2019)
As our society grows older new challenges for medicine and healthcare emerge. Age-related changes of the body have been observed in essential body functions, particularly in the loco-motor system, in the cardiovascular system and in cognitive functions concerning both brain plasticity and changes in behavior. Nutrition and lifestyle, such as nicotine intake and chronic alcohol consumption, also contribute to biological changes in the brain. This review addresses the effect of alcohol consumption on cognitive decline, changes in brain plasticity in the aging brain and on cardiovascular health in aging. Thus, studies on the interplay of chronic alcohol intake and either cognitive decline or cognitive preservation are outlined. Because of the inconsistency in the literature of whether alcohol consumption preserves cognitive functions in the aging brain or whether it accelerates cognitive decline, it is crucial to consider individual contributing factors such as culture, health and lifestyle in future studies.
The main goal of this thesis is to explore the feasibility of using cross-lingual annotation projection as a method of alleviating the task of manual coreference annotation.
To reach our goal, we build a first trilingual parallel coreference corpus that encompasses multiple genres. For the annotation of the corpus, we develop common coreference annotation guidelines that are applicable to three languages (English, German, Russian) and include a novel domain-independent typology of bridging relations as well as state-of-the-art near-identity categories.
Thereafter, we design and perform several annotation projection experiments. In the first experiment, we implement a direct projection method with only one source language. Our results indicate that, already in a knowledge-lean scenario, our projection approach is superior to the most closely related work of Postolache et al. (2006). Since the quality of the resulting annotations is to a high degree dependent on the word alignment, we demonstrate how using limited syntactic information helps to further improve mention extraction on the target side. As a next step, in our second experiment, we show how exploiting two source languages helps to improve the quality of target annotations for both language pairs by concatenating annotations projected from two source languages. Finally, we assess the projection quality in a fully automatic scenario (using automatically produced source annotations), and propose a pilot experiment on manual projection of bridging pairs.
For each of the experiments, we carry out an in-depth error analysis, and we conclude that noisy word alignments, translation divergences and morphological and syntactic differences between languages are responsible for projection errors. We systematically compare and evaluate our projection methods, and we investigate the errors both qualitatively and quantitatively in order to identify problematic cases. Finally, we discuss the applicability of our method to coreference annotations and propose several avenues of future research.
Back from the future
(2019)
Purpose: This study examines the temporal organization of vocalic anticipation in German children from 3 to 7 years of age and adults. The main objective was to test for nonlinear processes in vocalic anticipation, which may result from the interaction between lingual gestural goals for individual vowels and those for their neighbors over time. Method: The technique of ultrasound imaging was employed to record tongue movement at 5 time points throughout short utterances of the form V1#CV2. Vocalic anticipation was examined with generalized additive modeling, an analytical approach allowing for the estimation of both linear and nonlinear influences on anticipatory processes. Conclusions: A developmental transition towards more segmentally-specified coarticulatory organizations seems to occur from kindergarten to primary school to adulthood. In adults, nonlinear anticipatory patterns over time suggest a strong differentiation between the gestural goals for consecutive segments. In children, this differentiation is not yet mature: Vowels show greater prominence over time and seem activated more in phase with those of previous segments relative to adults.
This paper presents a combination of R packages-user contributed toolkits written in a common core programming language-to facilitate the humanistic investigation of digitised, text-based corpora.Our survey of text analysis packages includes those of our own creation (cleanNLP and fasttextM) as well as packages built by other research groups (stringi, readtext, hyphenatr, quanteda, and hunspell). By operating on generic object types, these packages unite research innovations in corpus linguistics, natural language processing, machine learning, statistics, and digital humanities. We begin by extrapolating on the theoretical benefits of R as an elaborate gluing language for bringing together several areas of expertise and compare it to linguistic concordancers and other tool-based approaches to text analysis in the digital humanities. We then showcase the practical benefits of an ecosystem by illustrating how R packages have been integrated into a digital humanities project. Throughout, the focus is on moving beyond the bag-of-words, lexical frequency model by incorporating linguistically-driven analyses in research.
Bienenfresserortungsversuch
(2019)
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.
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.
Children's online use of word order and morphosyntactic markers in Tagalog thematic role assignment
(2019)
We investigated whether Tagalog-speaking children incrementally interpret the first noun as the agent, even if verbal and nominal markers for assigning thematic roles are given early in Tagalog sentences. We asked five- and seven-year-old children and adult controls to select which of two pictures of reversible actions matched the sentence they heard, while their looks to the pictures were tracked. Accuracy and eye-tracking data showed that agent-initial sentences were easier to comprehend than patient-initial sentences, but the effect of word order was modulated by voice. Moreover, our eye-tracking data provided evidence that, by the first noun phrase, seven-year-old children looked more to the target in the agent-initial compared to the patient-initial conditions, but this word order advantage was no longer observed by the second noun phrase. The findings support language processing and acquisition models which emphasize the role of frequency in developing heuristic strategies (e.g., Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006).
Sentence comprehension requires that the comprehender work out who did what to whom. This process has been characterized as retrieval from memory. This review summarizes the quantitative predictions and empirical coverage of the two existing computational models of retrieval and shows how the predictive performance of these two competing models can be tested against a benchmark data-set. We also show how computational modeling can help us better understand sources of variability in both unimpaired and impaired sentence comprehension.
Connective-Lex
(2019)
In this paper, we present a tangible outcome of the TextLink network: a joint online database project displaying and linking existing and newly-created lexicons of discourse connectives in multiple languages. We discuss the definition and demarcation of the class of connectives that should be included in such a resource, and present the syntactic, semantic/pragmatic, and lexicographic information we collected. Further, the technical implementation of the database and the search functionality are presented. We discuss how the multilingual integration of several connective lexicons provides added value for linguistic researchers and other users interested in connectives, by allowing crosslinguistic comparison and a direct linking between discourse relational devices in different languages. Finally, we provide pointers for possible future extensions both in breadth (i.e., by adding lexicons for additional languages) and depth (by extending the information provided for each connective item and by strengthening the crosslinguistic links).
The current study investigates how bilingual children encode and produce morphologically complex words. We employed a silent-production-plus-delayed-vocalization paradigm in which event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during silent encoding of inflected words which were subsequently cued to be overtly produced. The bilingual children's spoken responses and their ERPs were compared to previous datasets from monolingual children on the same task. We found an enhanced negativity for regular relative to irregular forms during silent production in both bilingual children's languages, replicating the ERP effect previously obtained from monolingual children. Nevertheless, the bilingual children produced more morphological errors (viz. over-regularizations) than monolingual children. We conclude that mechanisms of morphological encoding (as measured by ERPs) are parallel for bilingual and monolingual children, and that the increased over-regularization rates are due to their reduced exposure to each of the two languages (relative to monolingual children).
There is an ongoing discussion in the literature whether the series of sentences ‘It’s not α that did P. α and β did P.’ is acceptable or not. Whereas the homogeneity approach in Büring & Križ 2013, Križ 2016, and Križ 2017 predicts these sentences to be unacceptable, the alternative-based approach predicts acceptability depending on the predicate being interpreted distributively or non- distributively (among others, Horn 1981, Velleman et al. 2012, Renans 2016a,b). We report on three experiments testing the predictions of both types of approaches. These studies provide empirical data that not only bears on these approaches, but also allows us to distinguish between different accounts of cleft exhaustivity that might otherwise make the same predictions. The results of the three studies reported here suggest that the acceptability of clefts depends on the interpretation of the predicate, thereby posing a serious challenge to the homogeneity approach, and contributing to the ongoing discussion on the semantics of it-clefts.
Experimenting with Lurchi
(2019)
The present work is a compilation of three original research articles submitted (or already published) in international peer-reviewed venues of the field of speech science. These three articles address the topics of fundamental motor laws in speech and dynamics of corresponding speech movements:
1. Kuberski, Stephan R. and Adamantios I. Gafos (2019). "The speed-curvature power law in tongue movements of repetitive speech". PLOS ONE 14(3). Public Library of Science. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213851.
2. Kuberski, Stephan R. and Adamantios I. Gafos (In press). "Fitts' law in tongue movements of repetitive speech". Phonetica: International Journal of Phonetic Science. Karger Publishers. doi: 10.1159/000501644
3. Kuberski, Stephan R. and Adamantios I. Gafos (submitted). "Distinct phase space topologies of identical phonemic sequences". Language. Linguistic Society of America.
The present work introduces a metronome-driven speech elicitation paradigm in which participants were asked to utter repetitive sequences of elementary consonant-vowel syllables. This paradigm, explicitly designed to cover speech rates from a substantially wider range than has been explored so far in previous work, is demonstrated to satisfy the important prerequisites for assessing so far difficult to access aspects of speech. Specifically, the paradigm's extensive speech rate manipulation enabled elicitation of a great range of movement speeds as well as movement durations and excursions of the relevant effectors. The presence of such variation is a prerequisite to assessing whether invariant relations between these and other parameters exist and thus provides the foundation for a rigorous evaluation of the two laws examined in the first two contributions of this work.
In the data resulting from this paradigm, it is shown that speech movements obey the same fundamental laws as movements from other domains of motor control do. In particular, it is demonstrated that speech strongly adheres to the power law relation between speed and curvature of movement with a clear speech rate dependency of the power law's exponent. The often-sought or reported exponent of one third in the statement of the law is unique to a subclass of movements which corresponds to the range of faster rates under which a particular utterance is produced. For slower rates, significantly larger values than one third are observed. Furthermore, for the first time in speech this work uncovers evidence for the presence of Fitts' law. It is shown that, beyond a speaker-specific speech rate, speech movements of the tongue clearly obey Fitts' law by emergence of its characteristic linear relation between movement time and index of difficulty. For slower speech rates (when temporal pressure is small), no such relation is observed. The methods and datasets obtained in the two assessment above provide a rigorous foundation both for addressing implications for theories and models of speech as well as for better understanding the status of speech movements in the context of human movements in general.
All modern theories of language rely on a fundamental segmental hypothesis according to which the phonological message of an utterance is represented by a sequence of segments or phonemes. It is commonly assumed that each of these phonemes can be mapped to some unit of speech motor action, a so-called speech gesture.
For the first time here, it is demonstrated that the relation between the phonological description of simple utterances and the corresponding speech motor action is non-unique. Specifically, by the extensive speech rate manipulation in the herein used experimental paradigm it is demonstrated that speech exhibits clearly distinct dynamical organizations underlying the production of simple utterances. At slower speech rates, the dynamical organization underlying the repetitive production of elementary /CV/ syllables can be described by successive concatenations of closing and opening gestures, each with its own equilibrium point. As speech rate increases, the equilibria of opening and closing gestures are not equally stable yielding qualitatively different modes of organization with either a single equilibrium point of a combined opening-closing gesture or a periodic attractor unleashed by the disappearance of both equilibria. This observation, the non-uniqueness of the dynamical organization underlying what on the surface appear to be identical phonemic sequences, is an entirely new result in the domain of speech. Beyond that, the demonstration of periodic attractors in speech reveals that dynamical equilibrium point models do not account for all possible modes of speech motor behavior.
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar is a constraint-based theory. It uses features and values to model linguistic objects. Values may be complex, e. g. consist of feature values pairs themselves. The paper shows that such feature value pairs together with identity of values and relations between feature values are sufficient to develop a complete linguistic theory including all linguistic levels of description. The paper explains the goals of researchers working in the framework and the way they deal with data and motivate their analyses. The framework is explained with respect to an example sentence that involves the following phenomena: valence, constituent structure, adjunction/modification, raising, case assignment, nonlocal dependencies, relative clauses.
Predictive coding and its generalization to active inference offer a unified theory of brain function. The underlying predictive processing paradigmhas gained significant attention in artificial intelligence research for its representation learning and predictive capacity. Here, we suggest that it is possible to integrate human and artificial generative models with a predictive coding network that processes sensations simultaneously with the signature of predictive coding found in human neuroimaging data. We propose a recurrent hierarchical predictive coding model that predicts low-dimensional representations of stimuli, electroencephalogram and physiological signals with variational inference. We suggest that in a shared environment, such hybrid predictive coding networks learn to incorporate the human predictive model in order to reduce prediction error. We evaluate the model on a publicly available EEG dataset of subjects watching one-minute long video excerpts. Our initial results indicate that the model can be trained to predict visual properties such as the amount, distance and motion of human subjects in videos.
This paper addresses the morpho-phonological, syntactic and pragmatic properties of postverbal subject constructions in Awing. Analogous to other inversion constructions in Bantu literature (Marten & Van der Wal 2014), Awing has a construction in which the subject occurs immediately after the verb, resulting in a subject or sentence focus interpretation. However in Awing, crucially, a VSX clause cannot host a subject marker, but must contain a certain le morpheme in sentence-initial position. Following Baker (2003) and Collins (2004), I argue that the subject marker triggers movement of the subject from Spec/vP, explaining why it is banned in VSX clauses. I further claim that although the subject is interpreted as focus, it is not in a lower focus phrase (Belletti 2004), but rather trapped in Spec/vP. Awing postverbal subject constructions also exhibit verb doubling: VSVO. I argue that verb doubling is due to Case requirement: In canonical SVO clauses the subject marker and the verb value the nominative and accusative Cases, respectively. In VSVO constructions, on the contrary, the verb values both nominative and accusative Cases, thus forcing syntax to spell out two copies of the same verb.
Language and aging research
(2019)
Our introduction to the special collection gives an overview of the research projects which were originally presented at the third CLARe network conference. We group the research under four cross-sectional topics that unite the different contributions: the data used in the research, the theoretical frameworks, the languages and varieties which are represented and the situational contexts which are examined. These projects represent the current state of research in this field and allows the reader to orient themselves within this diverse field but also leaves many questions open and provides impetus for future lines of research. The interaction and collaboration between diverse disciplines is the central aspect which unites all contributions to the special collection.
Le centenaire de la publication du Cours de linguistique générale (1916) de Ferdinand de Saussure nous a invité à reconsidérer l’importance de cet ouvrage et le rôle de son auteur pour la fondation d’une linguistique intégrée dans une sémiologie. Il n’y a aucun doute que cet auteur fut extrêmement important pour le développement de la linguistique structurale en Europe et qu’avec son concept du signe linguistique il a fait œuvre de pionnier pour le tournant sémiologique. Mais l’accueil favorable d’une théorie dans le milieu scientifique ne s’explique pas seulement par sa qualité intérieure, mais par plusieurs conditions extérieures. Ces conditions seront analysées sur trois plans: (1) l’arrivée de la méthode des néogrammairiens à ses limites qui incitait alors à l’étude de l’unité du signifiant et du signifié; (2) la simplification et l’outrance de la pensée structurale dans le Cours, publié en 1916 par Charles Bally et Albert Sechehaye et (3) la préparation de la réception de la pensée sémiologique par plusieurs travaux parallèles.
Leben mit Paradoxien
(2019)
Interlocutors typically link their utterances to the discourse environment and enrich communication by linguistic (e.g., information packaging) and extra-linguistic (e.g., eye gaze, gestures) means to optimize information transfer. Psycholinguistic studies underline that ‒for meaning computation‒ listeners profit from linguistic and visual cues that draw their focus of attention to salient information. This dissertation is the first work that examines how linguistic compared to visual salience cues influence sentence comprehension using the very same experimental paradigms and materials, that is, German subject-before-object (SO) and object-before-subject (OS) sentences, across the two cue modalities. Linguistic salience was induced by indicating a referent as the aboutness topic. Visual salience was induced by implicit (i.e., unconscious) or explicit (i.e., shared) manipulations of listeners’ attention to a depicted referent.
In Study 1, a selective, facilitative impact of linguistic salience on the context-sensitive OS word order was found using offline comprehensibility judgments. More precisely, during online sentence processing, this impact was characterized by a reduced sentence-initial Late positivity which reflects reduced processing costs for updating the current mental representation of discourse. This facilitative impact of linguistic salience was not replicated by means of an implicit visual cue (Study 2) shown to modulate word order preferences during sentence production. However, a gaze shift to a depicted referent as an indicator of shared attention eased sentence-initial processing similar to linguistic salience as revealed by reduced reading times (Study 3). Yet, this cue did not modulate the strong subject-antecedent preference during later pronoun resolution like linguistic salience. Taken together, these findings suggest a significant impact of linguistic and visual salience cues on sentence comprehension, which substantiates that both the information delivered via language and via the visual environment is integrated into the mental representation of the discourse; but, the way how salience is induced is crucial to its impact.
Metaphor and metonymy are likely the most common forms of non-literal language. As metaphor and metonymy differ conceptually and in how easy they are to comprehend, it seems likely that they also differ in their degree of non-literalness. They frequently occur in idioms which are foremost non-literal, fixed expressions. Given that non-literalness seems to be the defining criterion of what constitutes an idiom, it is striking that no study so far has focused specifically on differing non-literalness in idioms. It is unclear whether and how metaphoric and metonymic structures and their properties are perceived in idioms, given that the comprehension of idioms is driven by a number of other properties that are connected. This study divides idioms according to their metonymic or metaphoric structure and lets participants rate their non-literalness, familiarity, and transparency. It focuses on non-literalness as key property, finds it strongly connected to transparency, and to be the one key factor in predicting idiom type. Specifically, it reveals that metonymies are generally perceived as rather or even extremely literal, while metaphors are generally perceived as highly non-literal.
The field of cognitive aging has seen considerable advances in describing the linguistic and semantic changes that happen during the adult life span to uncover the structure of the mental lexicon (i.e., the mental repository of lexical and conceptual representations). Nevertheless, there is still debate concerning the sources of these changes, including the role of environmental exposure and several cognitive mechanisms associated with learning, representation, and retrieval of information. We review the current status of research in this field and outline a framework that promises to assess the contribution of both ecological and psychological aspects to the aging lexicon.
Zero-shot learning in Language & Vision is the task of correctly labelling (or naming) objects of novel categories. Another strand of work in L&V aims at pragmatically informative rather than "correct" object descriptions, e.g. in reference games. We combine these lines of research and model zero-shot reference games, where a speaker needs to successfully refer to a novel object in an image. Inspired by models of "rational speech acts", we extend a neural generator to become a pragmatic speaker reasoning about uncertain object categories. As a result of this reasoning, the generator produces fewer nouns and names of distractor categories as compared to a literal speaker. We show that this conversational strategy for dealing with novel objects often improves communicative success, in terms of resolution accuracy of an automatic listener.
Of Trees and Birds
(2019)
Gisbert Fanselow’s work has been invaluable and inspiring to many researchers working on syntax, morphology, and information structure, both from a theoretical and from an experimental perspective. This volume comprises a collection of articles dedicated to Gisbert on the occasion of his 60th birthday, covering a range of topics from these areas and beyond. The contributions have in common that in a broad sense they have to do with language structures (and thus trees), and that in a more specific sense they have to do with birds. They thus cover two of Gisbert’s major interests in- and outside of the linguistic world (and perhaps even at the interface).
On doubling unconditionals
(2019)
On uninterpretable features
(2019)
French participants learned English pseudowords either with the orthographic form displayed under the corresponding picture (Audio-Ortho) or without (Audio). In a naming task, pseudowords learned in the Audio-Ortho condition were produced faster and with fewer errors, providing a first piece of evidence that orthographic information facilitates the learning and on-line retrieval of productive vocabulary in a second language. Formant analyses, however, showed that productions from the Audio-Ortho condition were more French-like (i.e., less target-like), a result confirmed by a vowel categorization task performed by native speakers of English. It is argued that novel word learning and pronunciation accuracy should be considered together. (C) 2019 Acoustical Society of America