TY - INPR A1 - Abutalebi, Jubin A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Bilingualism, cognition, and aging T2 - Bilingualism : language and cognition. N2 - Extract: Topics in psycholinguistics and the neurocognition of language rarely attract the attention of journalists or the general public. One topic that has done so, however, is the potential benefits of bilingualism for general cognitive functioning and development, and as a precaution against cognitive decline in old age. Sensational claims have been made in the public domain, mostly by journalists and politicians. Recently (September 4, 2014) The Guardian reported that “learning a foreign language can increase the size of your brain”, and Michael Gove, the UK's previous Education Secretary, noted in an interview with The Guardian (September 30, 2011) that “learning languages makes you smarter”. The present issue of BLC addresses these topics by providing a state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and experimental research on the role of bilingualism for cognition in children and adults. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728914000741 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 18 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 2 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Budd, Mary-Jane A1 - Paulmann, Silke A1 - Barry, Christopher A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Producing morphologically complex words: An ERP study with children and adults JF - Developmental cognitive neuroscience : a journal for cognitive, affective and social developmental neuroscience N2 - widely studied morphological phenomenon in psycholinguistic research is the plurals-inside-compounds effect in English, which is the avoidance of regular plural modifiers within compounds (e.g., *rats hunter). The current study employs event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the production of plurals-inside-compounds in children and adults. We specifically examined the ERP correlates of producing morphologically complex words in 8-year-olds, 12-year-olds and adults, by recording ERPs during the silent production of compounds with plural or singular modifiers. Results for both children and adults revealed a negativity in response to compounds produced from regular plural forms when compared to compounds formed from irregular plurals, indicating a highly specific brain response to a subtle linguistic contrast. Although children performed behaviourally with an adult-like pattern in the task, we found a broader distribution and a considerably later latency in children's brain potentials than in adults', indicating that even in late childhood the brain networks involved in language processing are subject to subtle developmental changes. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. KW - ERPs KW - Morphology KW - Linguistics KW - Language production Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2014.11.002 SN - 1878-9293 SN - 1878-9307 VL - 12 SP - 51 EP - 60 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Clahsen, Harald A1 - Gerth, Sabrina A1 - Heyer, Vera A1 - Schott, Esther T1 - Morphology constrains native and non-native word formation in different ways Evidence from plurals inside compounds JF - The mental lexicon N2 - The role of morphological and syntactic information in non-native second language (L2) comprehension is controversial. Some have argued that late bilinguals rapidly integrate grammatical cues with other information sources during reading or listening in the same way as native speakers. Others claim that structural cues are underused in L2 processing. We examined different kinds of modifiers inside compounds (e.g. singulars vs. plurals, *rat eater vs. rats eater) with respect to this controversy which are subject to both structural and nonstructural constraints. Two offline and two online (eye-movement) experiments were performed examining the role of these constraints in spoken language comprehension of English and German, testing 77 advanced L2 learners. We also compared the L2 groups to corresponding groups of native speakers. Our results suggest that despite native-like sensitivity to the compounding constraints, late bilinguals rely more on non-structural constraints and are less able to revise their initial interpretations than L1 comprehenders. KW - morphological processing KW - compounding KW - visual world paradigm KW - eye movement KW - bilingualism KW - second language Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.10.1.03cla SN - 1871-1340 SN - 1871-1375 VL - 10 IS - 1 SP - 53 EP - 87 PB - Benjamins CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - GEN A1 - Abutalebi, Jubin A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Bilingualism, cognition, and aging T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Extract: Topics in psycholinguistics and the neurocognition of language rarely attract the attention of journalists or the general public. One topic that has done so, however, is the potential benefits of bilingualism for general cognitive functioning and development, and as a precaution against cognitive decline in old age. Sensational claims have been made in the public domain, mostly by journalists and politicians. Recently (September 4, 2014) The Guardian reported that “learning a foreign language can increase the size of your brain”, and Michael Gove, the UK's previous Education Secretary, noted in an interview with The Guardian (September 30, 2011) that “learning languages makes you smarter”. The present issue of BLC addresses these topics by providing a state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and experimental research on the role of bilingualism for cognition in children and adults. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 508 Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-414730 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 508 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 - 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 - 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 - 528 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-opus4-415478 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 528 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Verissimo, Joao Marques A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Variables and similarity in linguistic generalization: Evidence from inflectional classes in Portuguese JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - Two opposing viewpoints have been advanced to account for morphological productivity, one according to which some knowledge is couched in the form of operations over variables, and another in which morphological generalization is primarily determined by similarity. We investigated this controversy by examining the generalization of Portuguese verb stems, which fall into one of three conjugation classes. In Study 1, an elicited production task revealed that the generalization of 2nd and 3rd conjugation stems is influenced by the degree of phonological similarity between novel roots and existing verbs, whereas the 1st conjugation generalizes beyond similarity. In Study 2, we directly contrasted two distinct computational implementations of conjugation class assignment in how well they matched the human data: a similarity-driven model that captures phonological similarities, and a dual-mechanism model that implements an explicit distinction between context-free and similarity-based generalizations. The similarity-driven model consistently underestimated 1st conjugation responses and overestimated proportions of 2nd and 3rd conjugation responses, especially for novel verbs that are highly similar to existing verbs of those classes. In contrast, the expected proportions produced by the dual-mechanism model were statistically indistinguishable from human responses. We conclude that both context-free and context-sensitive processes determine the generalization of conjugations in Portuguese, and that similarity-based algorithms of morphological acquisition are insufficient to exhibit default-like generalization. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. KW - Variables KW - Similarity KW - Rules KW - Morphological generalization KW - Productivity KW - Computational modeling Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2014.06.001 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 76 SP - 61 EP - 79 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jaensch, Carol A1 - Heyer, Vera A1 - Gordon, Peter A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - What plurals and compounds reveal about constraints in word formation JF - Language acquisition : a journal of developmental linguistics N2 - Morphological systems are constrained in how they interact with each other. One case that has been widely studied in the psycholinguistic literature is the avoidance of plurals inside compounds (e.g. *rats eater vs. rat eater) in English and other languages, the so-called plurals-in-compounds effect. Several previous studies have shown that both adult and child speakers are sensitive to this contrast, but the question of whether semantic, morphological, or surface-form constraints are responsible for the plurals-in-compounds effect remains controversial. The present study provides new empirical evidence from adult and child English to resolve this controversy. Graded linguistic judgments were obtained from 96 children (age range: 7;06 to 12;08) and 32 adults. In the task, participants were asked to rate compounds containing different kinds of singular or plural modifiers. The results indicated that both children and adults disliked regular plurals inside compounds, whereas irregular plurals were rated as marginal and singulars as fully acceptable. Furthermore, acceptability ratings were found not to be affected by the phonological surface form of a compound-internal modifier. We conclude that semantic and morphological (rather than surface-form) constraints are responsible for the plurals-in-compounds effect, in both children and adults. Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2014.892949 SN - 1048-9223 SN - 1532-7817 VL - 21 IS - 4 SP - 319 EP - 338 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Clahsen, Harald A1 - Fleischhauer, Elisabeth T1 - Morphological priming in child German JF - Journal of child language Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000913000494 SN - 0305-0009 SN - 1469-7602 VL - 41 IS - 6 SP - 1305 EP - 1333 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER -