TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bosch, Sina
A1  - De Cesare, Ilaria
A1  - Demske, Ulrike
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Correction zu: Word-order variation and coherence in German infinitival complementation. - (The journal of comparative Germanic linguistics. -  26 (2023) 1) . - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-023-09140-8
JF  - The journal of comparative Germanic linguistics
Y1  - 2023
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-023-09143-5
SN  - 1383-4924
SN  - 1572-8552
VL  - 26
IS  - 1
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bosch, Sina
A1  - De Cesare, Ilaria
A1  - Demske, Ulrike
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Word-order variation and coherence in German infinitival complementation
JF  - The journal of comparative Germanic linguistics
N2  - This study provides a synthesis of corpus-based and experimental investigations of word-order preferences in German infinitival complementation. We carried out a systematic analysis of present-day German corpora to establish frequency distributions of different word-order options: extraposition, intraposition, and 'third construction'. We then examined, firstly, whether and to what extent corpus frequencies and processing economy constraints can predict the acceptability of these three word-order variants, and whether subject raising and subject control verbs form clearly distinguishable subclasses of infinitive-embedding verbs in terms of their word-order behaviour. Secondly, our study looks into the issue of coherence by comparing acceptability ratings for monoclausal coherent and biclausal incoherent construals of intraposed infinitives, and by examining whether a biclausal incoherent analysis gives rise to local and/or global processing difficulty. Taken together, our results revealed that (i) whilst the extraposition pattern consistently wins out over all other word-order variants for control verbs, neither frequency nor processing-based approaches to word-order variation can account for the acceptability of low-frequency variants, (ii) there is considerable verb-specific variation regarding word-order preferences both between and within the two sets of raising and control verbs under investigation, and (iii) although monoclausal coherent intraposition is rated above biclausal incoherent intraposition, the latter is not any more difficult to process than the former. Our findings indicate that frequency of occurrence and processing-related constraints interact with idiosyncratic lexical properties of individual verbs in determining German speakers' structural preferences.
KW  - Syntactic variation
KW  - German
KW  - Infinitives
KW  - Corpus linguistics
KW  - Acceptability judgements
KW  - Self-paced reading
Y1  - 2023
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-023-09140-8
SN  - 1572-8552
VL  - 26
IS  - 1
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hollenstein, Nora
A1  - Trondle, Marius
A1  - Plomecka, Martyna
A1  - Kiegeland, Samuel
A1  - Ozyurt, Yilmazcan
A1  - Jäger, Lena Ann
A1  - Langer, Nicolas
T1  - The ZuCo benchmark on cross-subject reading task classification with EEG and eye-tracking data
JF  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - We present a new machine learning benchmark for reading task classification with the goal of advancing EEG and eye-tracking research at the intersection between computational language processing and cognitive neuroscience. The benchmark task consists of a cross-subject classification to distinguish between two reading paradigms: normal reading and task-specific reading. The data for the benchmark is based on the Zurich Cognitive Language Processing Corpus (ZuCo 2.0), which provides simultaneous eye-tracking and EEG signals from natural reading of English sentences. The training dataset is publicly available, and we present a newly recorded hidden testset. We provide multiple solid baseline methods for this task and discuss future improvements. We release our code and provide an easy-to-use interface to evaluate new approaches with an accompanying public leaderboard: .
KW  - reading task classification
KW  - eye-tracking
KW  - EEG
KW  - machine learning
KW  - reading research
KW  - cross-subject evaluation
Y1  - 2023
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1028824
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 13
PB  - Frontiers Media
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Stone, Kate
A1  - Verissimo, Joao
A1  - Schad, Daniel J.
A1  - Oltrogge, Elise
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - Lago, Sol
T1  - The interaction of grammatically distinct agreement dependencies in predictive processing
JF  - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2  - Previous research has found that comprehenders sometimes predict information that is grammatically unlicensed by sentence constraints. An open question is why such grammatically unlicensed predictions occur. We examined the possibility that unlicensed predictions arise in situations of information conflict, for instance when comprehenders try to predict upcoming words while simultaneously building dependencies with previously encountered elements in memory. 

German possessive pronouns are a good testing ground for this hypothesis because they encode two grammatically distinct agreement dependencies: a retrospective one between the possessive and its previously mentioned referent, and a prospective one between the possessive and its following nominal head. In two visual world eye-tracking experiments, we estimated the onset of predictive effects in participants' fixations. 

The results showed that the retrospective dependency affected resolution of the prospective dependency by shifting the onset of predictive effects. 
We attribute this effect to an interaction between predictive and memory retrieval processes.
KW  - sentence processing
KW  - visual world eye-tracking
KW  - prediction
KW  - gender
KW  - agreement
KW  - German
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2021.1921816
SN  - 2327-3798
SN  - 2327-3801
VL  - 36
IS  - 9
SP  - 1159
EP  - 1179
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schmandt, Silvana
A1  - Nazzi, Thierry
A1  - New, Boris
T1  - Consonant, vowel and lexical neighbourhood processing during word recognition: new evidence using the sandwich priming technique
JF  - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2  - Studies on French adults using a written lexical decision task with masked priming, in which targets were more primed by consonant- (jalu-JOLI) than vowel-related (vobi-JOLI) primes, support the proposal that consonants have more weight than vowels in lexical processing. 
This study examines the phonological and/or lexical nature of this consonant bias 
(C-bias), using a sandwich priming task in which a brief presentation of the target 
(pre-prime) precedes the prime-target sequence, a manipulation blocking lexical neighbourhood effects. 
Results from three experiments (varying pre-prime/prime durations) show consistent 
C-priming and no significant V-priming at earlier and later processing stages (50 or 66 ms primes). 
Yet, a joint analysis reveals a small V-priming, while confirming a significant consonant advantage. 
This demonstrates the contribution of the phonological level to the C-bias. 
Second, differences in performance comparing the classic versus sandwich priming task also establish a contribution of lexical neighbourhood inhibition effects to the C-bias.
KW  - consonants and vowels
KW  - phonological and lexical processing
KW  - visual word recognition
KW  - consonant bias
KW  - sandwich priming paradigm
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2046115
SN  - 2327-3798
SN  - 2327-3801
VL  - 37
IS  - 9
SP  - 1115
EP  - 1130
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wiese, Heike
A1  - Alexiadou, Artemis
A1  - Allen, Shanley
A1  - Bunk, Oliver
A1  - Gagarina, Natalia
A1  - Iefremenko, Kateryna
A1  - Martynova, Maria
A1  - Pashkova, Tatiana
A1  - Rizou, Vicky
A1  - Schroeder, Christoph
A1  - Shadrova, Anna
A1  - Szucsich, Luka
A1  - Tracy, Rosemarie
A1  - Tsehaye, Wintai
A1  - Zerbian, Sabine
A1  - Zuban, Yulia
T1  - Heritage speakers as part of the native language continuum
JF  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. 

We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas.

(1) We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. 

(2) We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. 

(3) In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. 

Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. 

Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike.
KW  - heritage speakers
KW  - registers
KW  - participles
KW  - word order
KW  - bare NPs
KW  - boundary tone
KW  - referent introduction
KW  - relative clause formation
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717973
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 12
PB  - Frontiers Media
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Conrad, Markus
A1  - Ullrich, Susann
A1  - Schmidtke, David S.
A1  - Kotz, Sonja A.
T1  - ERPs reveal an iconic relation between sublexical phonology and affective meaning
JF  - Cognition : international journal of cognitive science
N2  - Classical linguistic theory assumes that formal aspects, like sound, are not internally related to the meaning of words. However, recent research suggests language might code affective meaning such as threat and alert sublexically. Positing affective phonological iconicity as a systematic organization principle of the German lexicon, we calculated sublexical affective values for sub-syllabic phonological word segments from a large-scale affective lexical German database by averaging valence and arousal ratings of all words any phonological segment appears in. We tested word stimuli with either consistent or inconsistent mappings between lexical affective meaning and sublexical affective values (negative-valence/high-arousal vs. neutral-valence/lowarousal) in an EEG visual-lexical-decision task. A mismatch between sublexical and lexical affective values elicited an increased N400 response. These results reveal that systematic affective phonological iconicity - extracted from the lexicon - impacts the extraction of lexical word meaning during reading.
KW  - Sound symbolism
KW  - Visual word recognition
KW  - Phonological iconicity
KW  - Affective meaning
KW  - N400
KW  - ERPs
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105182
SN  - 0010-0277
SN  - 1873-7838
VL  - 226
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Scheffler, Tatjana
A1  - Brandt, Lasse
A1  - de la Fuente, Marie
A1  - Nenchev, Ivan
T1  - Stimulus data and experimental design for a self-paced reading study on emoji-word substitutions
JF  - Data in Brief
N2  - This data paper presents the experimental design and stimuli from an online self-paced reading study on the processing of emojis substituting lexically ambiguous nouns. We recorded reading times for the target ambiguous nouns and for emojis depicting either the intended target referent or a contextually inappropriate homophonous noun. Furthermore, we recorded comprehension accuracy, demographics and a self-assessment of the participants' emoji usage frequency. The data includes all stimuli used, the raw data, the full JavaScript code for the online experiment, as well as Python and R code for the data analysis. We believe that our dataset may give important insights related to the comprehension mechanisms involved in the cognitive processing of emojis. For interpretation and discussion of the experiment, please see the original article entitled "The processing of emoji-word substitutions: A self-paced-reading study".
KW  - Emojis
KW  - Self-paced reading
KW  - Lexical ambiguity
KW  - Homonymy
KW  - Processing
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2022.108399
SN  - 2352-3409
VL  - 43
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bade, Nadine
A1  - Picat, Leo
A1  - Chung, WooJin
A1  - Mascarenhas, Salvador
T1  - Alternatives and attention in language and reasoning: A reply to Mascarenhas & Picat (2019)
JF  - Semantics and Pragmatics
N2  - In this paper, we employ an experimental paradigm using insights from the psychology of reasoning to investigate the question whether certain modals generate and draw attention to alternatives. The article extends and builds on the methodology and findings of Mascarenhas & Picat (2019). Based on experimental results, they argue that the English epistemic modal might raises alternatives. We apply the same methodology to the English modal allowed to to test different hypotheses regarding the involvement of alternatives in deontic modality. We find commonalities and differences between the two modals we tested. We discuss theoretical consequences for existing semantic analyses of these modals, and argue that reasoning tasks can serve as a diagnostic tool to discover which natural language expressions involve alternatives.
KW  - reasoning
KW  - modals
KW  - alternatives
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.15.2
SN  - 1937-8912
VL  - 15
PB  - Linguistic Society of America
CY  - Washington
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bürki, Audrey
A1  - Alario, F-Xavier
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - When words collide: Bayesian meta-analyses of distractor and target properties in the picture-word interference paradigm
JF  - Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
N2  - In the picture-word interference paradigm, participants name pictures while ignoring a written or spoken distractor word. Naming times to the pictures are slowed down by the presence of the distractor word. The present study investigates in detail the impact of distractor and target word properties on picture naming times, building on the seminal study by Miozzo and Caramazza. We report the results of several Bayesian meta-analyses based on 26 datasets. These analyses provide estimates of effect sizes and their precision for several variables and their interactions. They show the reliability of the distractor frequency effect on picture naming latencies (latencies decrease as the frequency of the distractor increases) and demonstrate for the first time the impact of distractor length, with longer naming latencies for trials with longer distractors. Moreover, distractor frequency interacts with target word frequency to predict picture naming latencies. The methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
KW  - Picture-word interference
KW  - Bayesian meta-analysis
KW  - distractor frequency
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221114644
SN  - 1747-0218
SN  - 1747-0226
VL  - 76
IS  - 6
SP  - 1410
EP  - 1430
PB  - Sage Publications
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Liu, Liquan
A1  - Götz, Antonia
A1  - Lorette, Pernelle
A1  - Tyler, Michael D.
T1  - How tone, intonation and emotion shape the development of infants' fundamental frequency perception
JF  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - Fundamental frequency (integral(0)), perceived as pitch, is the first and arguably most salient auditory component humans are exposed to since the beginning of life. 
It carries multiple linguistic (e.g., word meaning) and paralinguistic (e.g., speakers' emotion) functions in speech and communication. 
The mappings between these functions and integral(0) features vary within a language and differ cross-linguistically. For instance, a rising pitch can be perceived as a question in English but a lexical tone in Mandarin. Such variations mean that infants must learn the specific mappings based on their respective linguistic and social environments. 
To date, canonical theoretical frameworks and most empirical studies do not view or consider the multi-functionality of integral(0), but typically focus on individual functions. More importantly, despite the eventual mastery of integral(0) in communication, it is unclear how infants learn to decompose and recognize these overlapping functions carried by integral(0). In this paper, we review the symbioses and synergies of the lexical, intonational, and emotional functions that can be carried by integral(0) and are being acquired throughout infancy. 
On the basis of our review, we put forward the Learnability Hypothesis that infants decompose and acquire multiple integral(0) functions through native/environmental experiences. Under this hypothesis, we propose representative cases such as the synergy scenario, where infants use visual cues to disambiguate and decompose the different integral(0) functions. Further, viable ways to test the scenarios derived from this hypothesis are suggested across auditory and visual modalities. 
Discovering how infants learn to master the diverse functions carried by integral(0) can increase our understanding of linguistic systems, auditory processing and communication functions.
KW  - lexical tone
KW  - intonation, Prosody
KW  - phonological theory
KW  - sensory processing
KW  - cognitive processing
KW  - cross-linguistic transfer
KW  - emotional tone
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.906848
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 13
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schad, Daniel
A1  - Nicenboim, Bruno
A1  - Bürkner, Paul-Christian
A1  - Betancourt, Michael
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - Workflow techniques for the robust use of bayes factors
JF  - Psychological methods
N2  - Inferences about hypotheses are ubiquitous in the cognitive sciences. Bayes factors provide one general way to compare different hypotheses by their compatibility with the observed data. Those quantifications can then also be used to choose between hypotheses. While Bayes factors provide an immediate approach to hypothesis testing, they are highly sensitive to details of the data/model assumptions and it's unclear whether the details of the computational implementation (such as bridge sampling) are unbiased for complex analyses. Hem, we study how Bayes factors misbehave under different conditions. This includes a study of errors in the estimation of Bayes factors; the first-ever use of simulation-based calibration to test the accuracy and bias of Bayes factor estimates using bridge sampling; a study of the stability of Bayes factors against different MCMC draws and sampling variation in the data; and a look at the variability of decisions based on Bayes factors using a utility function. We outline a Bayes factor workflow that researchers can use to study whether Bayes factors are robust for their individual analysis. Reproducible code is available from haps://osf.io/y354c/. <br /> Translational Abstract <br /> In psychology and related areas, scientific hypotheses are commonly tested by asking questions like "is [some] effect present or absent." Such hypothesis testing is most often carried out using frequentist null hypothesis significance testing (NIIST). The NHST procedure is very simple: It usually returns a p-value, which is then used to make binary decisions like "the effect is present/abscnt." For example, it is common to see studies in the media that draw simplistic conclusions like "coffee causes cancer," or "coffee reduces the chances of geuing cancer." However, a powerful and more nuanced alternative approach exists: Bayes factors. Bayes factors have many advantages over NHST. However, for the complex statistical models that arc commonly used for data analysis today, computing Bayes factors is not at all a simple matter. In this article, we discuss the main complexities associated with computing Bayes factors. This is the first article to provide a detailed workflow for understanding and computing Bayes factors in complex statistical models. The article provides a statistically more nuanced way to think about hypothesis testing than the overly simplistic tendency to declare effects as being "present" or "absent".
KW  - Bayes factors
KW  - Bayesian model comparison
KW  - prior
KW  - posterior
KW  - simulation-based calibration
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000472
SN  - 1082-989X
SN  - 1939-1463
VL  - 28
IS  - 6
SP  - 1404
EP  - 1426
PB  - American Psychological Association
CY  - Washington
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Cuperus, Pauline
A1  - de Kok, Dörte
A1  - de Aguiar, Vania
A1  - Nickels, Lyndsey
T1  - Understanding user needs for digital aphasia therapy
BT  - experiences and preferences of speech and language therapists
JF  - Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal
N2  - Background: 
Aphasia therapy software applications (apps) can help achieve recommendations regarding aphasia treatment intensity and duration. 
However, we currently know very little about speech and language therapists' (SLTs) preferences with regards to these apps. 
This may be problematic, as clinician acceptance of novel treatments and technology are a key factor for successful translation from research evidence to practice. 

Aim: 
This research aimed to increase our understanding of clinicians' experiences with aphasia therapy apps and their perceived barriers and facilitators to the use of aphasia apps. Furthermore, we wanted to explore the influence of some demographic factors (age, country, and SLT availability in the client's hometown) on SLTs' attitudes towards these apps.
 
Method & Procedures:  
35 Dutch and 29 Australian SLTs completed an online survey. The survey contained 9 closed-ended questions and 3 open-ended questions. Responses to the closed-ended questions were summarised through the use of descriptive statistics. The responses to the open questions were analysed and coded into recurring themes that were derived from the data. Logistic regression analyses were performed to explore the relationship between the demographic variables and the responses to the closed-ended questions. 

Outcomes & results: 
Participants were overwhelmingly positive about aphasia therapy apps and saw the potential for their clients to use apps independently. As facilitators of app use, participants reported accessibility and inclusion of different language modalities, while high costs, absence of a compatible device, and clients' potential computer illiteracy were listed as barriers. None of the analysed demographic factors consistently influenced differences in participants' attitudes towards aphasia therapy apps. 

Conclusions: 
The positive, extensive and insightful feedback from speech and language therapists is both useful and encouraging for app developers and aphasia researchers, and should facilitate the development of appropriate, high-quality therapy apps.
KW  - telemedicine
KW  - mobile applications
KW  - user research
KW  - speech and language therapy
KW  - clinician feedback
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2022.2066622
SN  - 0268-7038
SN  - 1464-5041
VL  - 37
IS  - 7
SP  - 1016
EP  - 1038
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Räling, Romy
A1  - Hanne, Sandra
A1  - Schröder, Astrid
A1  - Keßler, Carla
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
T1  - Judging the animacy of words
BT  - The influence of typicality and age of acquisition in a semantic decision task
JF  - Quarterly journal of experimental psychology
N2  - The age at which members of a semantic category are learned (age of acquisition), the typicality they demonstrate within their corresponding category, and the semantic domain to which they belong (living, non-living) are known to influence the speed and accuracy of lexical/semantic processing. So far, only a few studies have looked at the origin of age of acquisition and its interdependence with typicality and semantic domain within the same experimental design. Twenty adult participants performed an animacy decision task in which nouns were classified according to their semantic domain as being living or non-living. Response times were influenced by the independent main effects of each parameter: typicality, age of acquisition, semantic domain, and frequency. However, there were no interactions. The results are discussed with respect to recent models concerning the origin of age of acquisition effects.
KW  - Age of acquisition
KW  - Animacy decision
KW  - Semantic classification task
KW  - Typicality
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2016.1223704
SN  - 1747-0218
SN  - 1747-0226
VL  - 70
IS  - 10
SP  - 2094
EP  - 2104
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Offrede, Tom F.
A1  - Jacobi, Jidde
A1  - Rebernik, Teja
A1  - de Jong, Lisanne
A1  - Keulen, Stefanie
A1  - Veenstra, Pauline
A1  - Noiray, Aude
A1  - Wieling, Martijn
T1  - The impact of alcohol on L1 versus L2
JF  - Language and Speech
N2  - Alcohol intoxication is known to affect many aspects of human behavior and cognition; one of such affected systems is articulation during speech production. Although much research has revealed that alcohol negatively impacts pronunciation in a first language (L1), there is only initial evidence suggesting a potential beneficial effect of inebriation on articulation in a non-native language (L2). The aim of this study was thus to compare the effect of alcohol consumption on pronunciation in an L1 and an L2. Participants who had ingested different amounts of alcohol provided speech samples in their L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English), and native speakers of each language subsequently rated the pronunciation of these samples on their intelligibility (for the L1) and accent nativelikeness (for the L2). These data were analyzed with generalized additive mixed modeling. Participants' blood alcohol concentration indeed negatively affected pronunciation in L1, but it produced no significant effect on the L2 accent ratings. The expected negative impact of alcohol on L1 articulation can be explained by reduction in fine motor control. We present two hypotheses to account for the absence of any effects of intoxication on L2 pronunciation: (1) there may be a reduction in L1 interference on L2 speech due to decreased motor control or (2) alcohol may produce a differential effect on each of the two linguistic subsystems.
KW  - acute alcohol consumption
KW  - articulation
KW  - speech
KW  - bilingualism
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830920953169
SN  - 1756-6053
SN  - 0023-8309
VL  - 64
IS  - 3
SP  - 681
EP  - 692
PB  - SAGE Publications
CY  - Thousand Oaks
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban
A1  - Poppels, Till
A1  - Levy, Roger P.
T1  - Implicit gender bias in linguistic descriptions for expected events
BT  - the cases of the 2016 United States and 2017 United Kingdom elections
JF  - Psychological Science
N2  - Gender stereotypes influence subjective beliefs about the world, and this is reflected in our use of language. But do gender biases in language transparently reflect subjective beliefs? Or is the process of translating thought to language itself biased? During the 2016 United States (N = 24,863) and 2017 United Kingdom (N = 2,609) electoral campaigns, we compared participants' beliefs about the gender of the next head of government with their use and interpretation of pronouns referring to the next head of government. In the United States, even when the female candidate was expected to win, she pronouns were rarely produced and induced substantial comprehension disruption. In the United Kingdom, where the incumbent female candidate was heavily favored, she pronouns were preferred in production but yielded no comprehension advantage. These and other findings suggest that the language system itself is a source of implicit biases above and beyond previously known biases, such as those measured by the Implicit Association Test.
KW  - language
KW  - psycholinguistics
KW  - event expectations
KW  - reference
KW  - implicit bias
KW  - open data
KW  - open materials
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619890619
SN  - 0956-7976
SN  - 1467-9280
VL  - 31
IS  - 2
SP  - 115
EP  - 128
PB  - Sage
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Parshina, Olga
A1  - Laurinavichyute, Anna
A1  - Sekerina, Irina A.
T1  - Eye-movement benchmarks in heritage language reading
JF  - Bilingualism : language and cognition
N2  - This eye-tracking study establishes basic benchmarks of eye movements during reading in heritage language (HL) by Russian-speaking adults and adolescents of high (n = 21) and low proficiency (n = 27). Heritage speakers (HSs) read sentences in Cyrillic, and their eye movements were compared to those of Russian monolingual skilled adult readers, 8-year-old children and L2 learners. Reading patterns of HSs revealed longer mean fixation durations, lower skipping probabilities, and higher regressive saccade rates than in monolingual adults. High-proficient HSs were more similar to monolingual children, while low-proficient HSs performed on par with L2 learners. Low-proficient HSs differed from high-proficient HSs in exhibiting lower skipping probabilities, higher fixation counts, and larger frequency effects. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the weaker links account of bilingual language processing as well as the divergent attainment theory of HL.
KW  - bilingualism
KW  - heritage language
KW  - reading
KW  - eye movements
KW  - Russian
KW  - children
KW  - L2 learners
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S136672892000019X
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 24
IS  - 1
SP  - 69
EP  - 82
PB  - Cambridge University Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Fritzsche, Tom
A1  - Meß, Katharina
A1  - Philipp, Mareike
A1  - Gafos, Adamantios I.
T1  - Only the right noise?
BT  - Effects of phonetic and visual input variability on 14-month-olds' minimal pair word learning
JF  - Developmental Science
N2  - Seminal work by Werker and colleagues (Stager & Werker [1997]Nature, 388, 381-382) has found that 14-month-old infants do not show evidence for learning minimal pairs in the habituation-switch paradigm. However, when multiple speakers produce the minimal pair in acoustically variable ways, infants' performance improves in comparison to a single speaker condition (Rost & McMurray [2009]Developmental Science, 12, 339-349). The current study further extends these results and assesses how different kinds of input variability affect 14-month-olds' minimal pair learning in the habituation-switch paradigm testing German learning infants. The first two experiments investigated word learning when the labels were spoken by a single speaker versus when the labels were spoken by multiple speakers. In the third experiment we studied whether non-acoustic variability, implemented by visual variability of the objects presented together with the labels, would also affect minimal pair learning. We found enhanced learning in the multiple speakers compared to the single speaker condition, confirming previous findings with English-learning infants. In contrast, visual variability of the presented objects did not support learning. These findings both confirm and better delimit the beneficial role of speech-specific variability in minimal pair learning. Finally, we review different proposals on the mechanisms via which variability confers benefits to learning and outline what may be likely principles that underlie this benefit. We highlight among these the multiplicity of acoustic cues signalling phonemic contrasts and the presence of relations among these cues. It is in these relations where we trace part of the source for the apparent paradoxical benefit of variability in learning.
KW  - acoustic variability
KW  - habituation-switch paradigm
KW  - infant word learning
KW  - minimal pairs
KW  - phonological development
KW  - visual variability
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12950
SN  - 1363-755X
SN  - 1467-7687
VL  - 23
IS  - 5
SP  - 1
EP  - 16
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Oxford
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  - JOUR
A1  - Heffner, Christopher C.
A1  - Fuhrmeister, Pamela
A1  - Luthra, Sahil
A1  - Mechtenberg, Hannah
A1  - Saltzman, David
A1  - Myers, Emily B.
T1  - Reliability and validity for perceptual flexibility in speech
JF  - Brain and language : a journal of clinical, experimental and theoretical research
N2  - The study of perceptual flexibility in speech depends on a variety of tasks that feature a large degree of variability between participants. Of critical interest is whether measures are consistent within an individual or across stimulus contexts. This is particularly key for individual difference designs that are deployed to examine the neural basis or clinical consequences of perceptual flexibility. In the present set of experiments, we assess the split-half reliability and construct validity of five measures of perceptual flexibility: three of learning in a native language context (e.g., understanding someone with a foreign accent) and two of learning in a non-native context (e.g., learning to categorize non-native speech sounds). We find that most of these tasks show an appreciable level of split-half reliability, although construct validity was sometimes weak. This provides good evidence for reliability for these tasks, while highlighting possible upper limits on expected effect sizes involving each measure.
KW  - Reliability
KW  - Construct validity
KW  - Individual differences
KW  - Speech
KW  - perception
KW  - Phonetic identification
KW  - Phonetic learning
KW  - Phonetic
KW  - adaptation
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2021.105070
SN  - 0093-934X
SN  - 1090-2155
VL  - 226
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam [u.a.]
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Laurinavichyute, Anna
A1  - von der Malsburg, Titus
T1  - Semantic attraction in sentence comprehension
JF  - Cognitive science
N2  - Agreement attraction is a cross-linguistic phenomenon where a verb occasionally agrees not with its subject, as required by grammar, but instead with an unrelated noun ("The key to the cabinets were horizontal ellipsis ").
Despite the clear violation of grammatical rules, comprehenders often rate these sentences as acceptable. Contenders for explaining agreement attraction fall into two broad classes: Morphosyntactic accounts specifically designed to explain agreement attraction, and more general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model, which explain attraction as a consequence of how linguistic structure is stored and accessed in content-addressable memory.
In the present research, we disambiguate between these two classes by testing a surprising prediction made by the Lewis and Vasishth model but not by the morphosyntactic accounts, namely, that attraction should not be limited to morphosyntax, but that semantic features of unrelated nouns equally induce attraction. 
A recent study by Cunnings and Sturt provided initial evidence that this may be the case. Here, we report three single-trial experiments in English that compared semantic and agreement attraction and tested whether and how the two interact. 
All three experiments showed strong semantically induced attraction effects closely mirroring agreement attraction effects. We complement these results with computational simulations which confirmed that the Lewis and Vasishth model can faithfully reproduce the observed results. 
In sum, our findings suggest that attraction is a more general phenomenon than is commonly believed, and therefore favor more general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model.
KW  - agreement attraction
KW  - computational modeling
KW  - sentence processing;
KW  - similarity-based interference
KW  - semantic attraction
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13086
SN  - 0364-0213
SN  - 1551-6709
VL  - 46
IS  - 2
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kidd, Evan
A1  - Garcia, Rowena
T1  - How diverse is child language acquisition research?
JF  - First language
N2  - A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world's 7000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in many of them. Here, we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal of Child Language, First Language, Language Acquisition and Language Learning and Development. We coded each article for several variables, including (1) participant group (mono vs multilingual), (2) language(s), (3) topic(s) and (4) country of author affiliation, from each journal's inception until the end of 2020. We found that we have at least one article published on around 103 languages, representing approximately 1.5% of the world's languages. The distribution of articles was highly skewed towards English and other well-studied Indo-European languages, with the majority of non-Indo-European languages having just one paper. A majority of the papers focused on studies of monolingual children, although papers did not always explicitly report participant group status. The distribution of topics across language categories was more even. The number of articles published on non-Indo-European languages from countries outside of North America and Europe is increasing; however, this increase is driven by research conducted in relatively wealthy countries. Overall, the vast majority of the research was produced in the Global North. We conclude that, despite a proud history of crosslinguistic research, the goals of the discipline need to be recalibrated before we can lay claim to truly a representative account of child language acquisition.
KW  - linguistic diversity
KW  - child language acquisition
KW  - typology
KW  - archival
KW  - research
KW  - language coverage
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237211066405
SN  - 0142-7237
SN  - 1740-2344
VL  - 42
IS  - 6
SP  - 703
EP  - 735
PB  - Sage
CY  - London [u.a.]
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Skopeteas, Stavros
A1  - Verhoeven, Elisabeth
A1  - Fanselow, Gisbert
T1  - Discontinuous noun phrases in Yucatec Maya
JF  - Journal of linguistics : JL / publ. for the Linguistics Association of Great Britain
N2  - Languages differ in whether or not they allow discontinuous noun phrases. If they do, they further vary in the ways the nominal projections interact with the available syntactic operations. Yucatec Maya has two left-peripheral configurations that differ syntactically: a preverbal position for foci or wh-elements that is filled in by movement, and the possibility to adjoin topics at the highest clausal layer. These two structural options are reflected in different ways of the formation of discontinuous patterns. Subextraction from nominal projections to the focus position yielding discontinuous NPs is possible, but subject to several restrictions. It observes conditions on extraction domains, and does not apply to the left branch of nominal structures. The topic position also appears to license discontinuity, typically involving a non-referential nominal expression as the topic and quantifiers/adjectives that form an elliptical nominal projection within the clause proper. Such constructions can involve several morphological and syntactic mismatches between their parts that are excluded for continuous noun phrases, and they are not sensitive to syntactic island restrictions. Thus, in a strict sense, discontinuities involving the topic position are only apparent, because the construction involves two independent nominal projections that are semantically linked.
KW  - discontinuous noun phrases
KW  - focus movement
KW  - left dislocation
KW  - possessor
KW  - extraction
KW  - split topicalization
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226720000419
SN  - 0022-2267
SN  - 1469-7742
VL  - 58
IS  - 3
SP  - 609
EP  - 648
PB  - Cambridge University Press
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Yadav, Himanshu
A1  - Husain, Samar
A1  - Futrell, Richard
T1  - Do dependency lengths explain constraints on crossing dependencies?
JF  - Linguistics vanguard : multimodal online journal
N2  - In syntactic dependency trees, when arcs are drawn from syntactic heads to dependents, they rarely cross. Constraints on these crossing dependencies are critical for determining the syntactic properties of human language, because they define the position of natural language in formal language hierarchies. We study whether the apparent constraints on crossing syntactic dependencies in natural language might be explained by constraints on dependency lengths (the linear distance between heads and dependents). We compare real dependency trees from treebanks of 52 languages against baselines of random trees which are matched with the real trees in terms of their dependency lengths. We find that these baseline trees have many more crossing dependencies than real trees, indicating that a constraint on dependency lengths alone cannot explain the empirical rarity of crossing dependencies. However, we find evidence that a combined constraint on dependency length and the rate of crossing dependencies might be able to explain two of the most-studied formal restrictions on dependency trees: gap degree and well-nestedness.
KW  - crossing dependencies
KW  - dependency length
KW  - dependency treebanks
KW  - efficiency
KW  - language processing
KW  - syntax
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0070
SN  - 2199-174X
VL  - 7
PB  - De Gruyter Mouton
CY  - Berlin ; New York, NY
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Czapka, Sophia
A1  - Schwieter, John W.
A1  - Festman, Julia
T1  - The influence of peripheral emotions on inhibitory control among children
JF  - Acta psychologica : international journal of psychonomics
N2  - In this study, we investigated the cognitive-emotional interplay by measuring the effects of executive competition (Pessoa, 2013), i.e., how inhibitory control is influenced when emotional information is encountered. Sixty-three children (8 to 9 years of age) participated in an inhibition task (central task) accompanied by happy, sad, or neutral emoticons (displayed in the periphery). Typical interference effects were found in the main task for speed and accuracy, but in general, these effects were not additionally modulated by the peripheral emoticons indicating that processing of the main task exhausted the limited capacity such that interference from the task-irrelevant, peripheral information did not show (Pessoa, 2013). Further analyses revealed that the magnitude of interference effects depended on the order of congruency conditions: when incongruent conditions preceded congruent ones, there was greater interference. This effect was smaller in sad conditions, and particularly so at the beginning of the experiment. These findings suggest that the bottom-up perception of task-irrelevant emotional information influenced the top-down process of inhibitory control among children in the sad condition when processing demands were particularly high. We discuss if the salience and valence of the emotional stimuli as well as task demands are the decisive characteristics that modulate the strength of this relation.
KW  - Executive function
KW  - Inhibitory control task
KW  - Cognitive emotional
KW  - regulation
KW  - Primary school children
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103507
SN  - 0001-6918
SN  - 1873-6297
VL  - 223
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Vicente, Luis
A1  - Barros, Matthew
A1  - Messick, Troy
A1  - Saab, Andres
T1  - On a nonargument for cleft sources in sluicing
JF  - Linguistic inquiry
N2  - On the basis of certain semantic intuitions, Barros (2012) argues that ellipsis does not require structural isomorphism between elided structure and its antecedent. We tackle this claim. Semantic intuitions cannot be a pointer to the analysis of silent structure. We provide empirical evidence that raises the question of to what extent semantic intuitions about plausible articulable syntax must inform one's analysis of silent structure. We conclude that the answer to this question must be crosslinguistically informed. We conjecture that ellipsis introduces ellipsis-specific interpretive mechanisms, so that intuitions about "how the unelided structure would be interpreted" are not empirically relevant.
KW  - sluicing
KW  - contextual restriction
KW  - ellipsis identity
KW  - inheritance of
KW  - content
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00390
SN  - 0024-3892
SN  - 1530-9150
VL  - 52
IS  - 4
SP  - 867
EP  - 880
PB  - MIT Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Albert, Aviad
A1  - Nicenboim, Bruno
T1  - Modeling sonority in terms of pitch intelligibility with the nucleus attraction principle
JF  - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society
N2  - Sonority is a fundamental notion in phonetics and phonology, central to many descriptions of the syllable and various useful predictions in phonotactics. Although widely accepted, sonority lacks a clear basis in speech articulation or perception, given that traditional formal principles in linguistic theory are often exclusively based on discrete units in symbolic representation and are typically not designed to be compatible with auditory perception, sensorimotor control, or general cognitive capacities. In addition, traditional sonority principles also exhibit systematic gaps in empirical coverage. Against this backdrop, we propose the incorporation of symbol-based and signal-based models to adequately account for sonority in a complementary manner. We claim that sonority is primarily a perceptual phenomenon related to pitch, driving the optimization of syllables as pitch-bearing units in all language systems. We suggest a measurable acoustic correlate for sonority in terms of periodic energy, and we provide a novel principle that can account for syllabic well-formedness, the nucleus attraction principle (NAP). We present perception experiments that test our two NAP-based models against four traditional sonority models, and we use a Bayesian data analysis approach to test and compare them. Our symbolic NAP model outperforms all the other models we test, while our continuous bottom-up NAP model is at second place, along with the best performing traditional models. We interpret the results as providing strong support for our proposals: (i) the designation of periodic energy as the acoustic correlate of sonority; (ii) the incorporation of continuous entities in phonological models of perception; and (iii) the dual-model strategy that separately analyzes symbol-based top-down processes and signal-based bottom-up processes in speech perception.
KW  - Sonority
KW  - Pitch intelligibility
KW  - Periodic energy
KW  - Bayesian data
KW  - analysis
KW  - Speech perception
KW  - Phonetics and phonology
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13161
SN  - 0364-0213
SN  - 1551-6709
VL  - 46
IS  - 7
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ciaccio, Laura Anna
A1  - Veríssimo, João
T1  - Investigating variability in morphological processing with Bayesian distributional models
JF  - Psychonomic bulletin & review : a journal of the Psychonomic Society
N2  - We investigated the processing of morphologically complex words adopting an approach that goes beyond estimating average effects and allows testing predictions about variability in performance. We tested masked morphological priming effects with English derived ('printer') and inflected ('printed') forms priming their stems ('print') in non-native speakers, a population that is characterized by large variability. We modeled reaction times with a shifted-lognormal distribution using Bayesian distributional models, which allow assessing effects of experimental manipulations on both the mean of the response distribution ('mu') and its standard deviation ('sigma'). Our results show similar effects on mean response times for inflected and derived primes, but a difference between the two on the sigma of the distribution, with inflectional priming increasing response time variability to a significantly larger extent than derivational priming. This is in line with previous research on non-native processing, which shows more variable results across studies for the processing of inflected forms than for derived forms. More generally, our study shows that treating variability in performance as a direct object of investigation can crucially inform models of language processing, by disentangling effects which would otherwise be indistinguishable. We therefore emphasize the importance of looking beyond average performance and testing predictions on other parameters of the distribution rather than just its central tendency.
KW  - RT distribution
KW  - Distributional models
KW  - Masked priming
KW  - Visual word
KW  - recognition
KW  - Morphological processing
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02109-w
SN  - 1069-9384
SN  - 1531-5320
SP  - 2264
EP  - 2274
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar
A1  - Küttner, Uwe-Alexander
A1  - Raymond, Chase Wesley
T1  - Pivots revisited
BT  - cesuring in action
JF  - Open linguistics
N2  - The term "pivot" usually refers to two overlapping syntactic units such that the completion of the first unit simultaneously launches the second. In addition, pivots are generally said to be characterized by the smooth prosodic integration of their syntactic parts. This prosodic integration is typically achieved by prosodic-phonetic matching of the pivot components. As research on such turns in a range of languages has illustrated, speakers routinely deploy pivots so as to be able to continue past a point of possible turn completion, in the service of implementing some additional or revised action. This article seeks to build on, and complement, earlier research by exploring two issues in more detail as follows: (1) what exactly do pivotal turn extensions accomplish on the action dimension, and (2) what role does prosodic-phonetic packaging play in this? We will show that pivot constructions not only exhibit various degrees of prosodic-phonetic (non-)integration, i.e., differently strong cesuras, but that they can be ordered on a continuum, and that this cline maps onto the relationship of the actions accomplished by the components of the pivot construction. While tighter prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., weak(er) cesuring, co-occurs with post-pivot actions whose relationship to that of the pre-pivot tends to be rather retrospective in character, looser prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., strong(er) cesuring, is associated with a more prospective orientation of the post-pivot's action. These observations also raise more general questions with regard to the analysis of action.
KW  - Conversation Analysis
KW  - Interactional Linguistics
KW  - syntax
KW  - talk-in-interaction
KW  - prosody
KW  - phonetics
KW  - cesuras
KW  - intonation units
KW  - social action
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2020-0152
SN  - 2300-9969
VL  - 7
IS  - 1
SP  - 613
EP  - 637
PB  - de Gruyter
CY  - Warsaw
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schoknecht, Pia
A1  - Roehm, Dietmar
A1  - Schlesewsky, Matthias
A1  - Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina
T1  - The interaction of predictive processing and similarity-based retrieval interference
BT  - an ERP study
JF  - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2  - Language processing requires memory retrieval to integrate current input with previous context and making predictions about upcoming input. We propose that prediction and retrieval are two sides of the same coin, i.e. functionally the same, as they both activate memory representations. Under this assumption, memory retrieval and prediction should interact: Retrieval interference can only occur at a word that triggers retrieval and a fully predicted word would not do that. The present study investigated the proposed interaction with event-related potentials (ERPs) during the processing of sentence pairs in German. Predictability was measured via cloze probability. Memory retrieval was manipulated via the position of a distractor inducing proactive or retroactive similarity-based interference. Linear mixed model analyses provided evidence for the hypothesised interaction in a broadly distributed negativity, which we discuss in relation to the interference ERP literature. Our finding supports the proposal that memory retrieval and prediction are functionally the same.
KW  - Language
KW  - memory retrieval
KW  - interference
KW  - prediction
KW  - predictive
KW  - processing
KW  - interaction
KW  - ERP
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2026421
SN  - 2327-3798
SN  - 2327-3801
VL  - 37
IS  - 7
SP  - 883
EP  - 901
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gianelli, Claudia
A1  - Kühne, Katharina
A1  - Lo Presti, Sara
A1  - Mencaraglia, Silvia
A1  - Dalla Volta, Riccardo
T1  - Action processing in the motor system
BT  - Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) evidence of shared mechanisms in the visual and linguistic modalities
JF  - Brain and cognition : a journal of experimental and clinical research
N2  - In two experiments, we compared the dynamics of corticospinal excitability when processing visually or linguistically presented tool-oriented hand actions in native speakers and sequential bilinguals. In a third experiment we used the same procedure to test non-motor, low-level stimuli, i.e. scrambled images and pseudo-words.
Stimuli were presented in sequence: pictures (tool + tool-oriented hand action or their scrambled counterpart) and words (tool noun + tool-action verb or pseudo-words). Experiment 1 presented German linguistic stimuli to native speakers, while Experiment 2 presented English stimuli to non-natives. Experiment 3 tested Italian native speakers. Single-pulse trascranial magnetic stimulation (spTMS) was applied to the left motor cortex at five different timings: baseline, 200 ms after tool/noun onset, 150, 350 and 500 ms after hand/verb onset with motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and abductor digiti minimi (ADM) muscles. 
We report strong similarities in the dynamics of corticospinal excitability across the visual and linguistic modalities. MEPs' suppression started as early as 150 ms and lasted for the duration of stimulus presentation (500 ms). Moreover, we show that this modulation is absent for stimuli with no motor content. Overall, our study supports the notion of a core, overarching system of action semantics shared by different modalities.
KW  - TMS
KW  - motor cortex
KW  - action observation
KW  - action language
KW  - motor
KW  - inhibition
KW  - motor-evoked potentials
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2019.105510
SN  - 0278-2626
SN  - 1090-2147
VL  - 139
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Sotiropoulou, Stavroula
A1  - Gibson, Mark
A1  - Gafos, Adamantios I.
T1  - Global organization in Spanish onsets
JF  - Journal of phonetics
N2  - This paper addresses the relation between syllable structure and inter-segmental temporal coordination. The data examined are Electromagnetic Articulometry recordings from six speakers of Central Peninsular Spanish (henceforth, Spanish), producing words beginning with the clusters /pl, bl, kl, gl, p(sic), k(sic), t(sic)/ as well as corresponding unclustered sonorant-initial words in three vowel contexts /a, e, o/. In our results, we find evidence for a global organization of the segments involved in these combinations. This is reflected in a number of ways: shortening of the prevocalic sonorant in the cluster-initial case compared to the unclustered case, reorganization of the relative timing of the internal CV subsequence (in a CCV) in the obstruent-lateral context, early vowel initiation, and a strong compensatory relation between the duration of the obstruent-to-lateral transition and the duration of the lateral. In other words, we find that the global organization presiding over the segments partaking in these tautosyllabic CCVs is pleiotropic, that is, simultaneously expressed over a set of different phonetic parameters rather than via a privileged metric such as c-center stability or any other such given single measure (employed in prior works).
KW  - syllables
KW  - inter-segmental coordination
KW  - Central Peninsular Spanish
KW  - obstruent-lateral clusters
KW  - obstruent-rhotic clusters
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2020.100995
SN  - 0095-4470
VL  - 82
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Nicenboim, Bruno
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - Rösler, Frank
T1  - Are words pre-activated probabilistically during sentence comprehension?
BT  - evidence from new data and a Bayesian random-effects meta-analysis using publicly available data
JF  - Neuropsychologia : an international journal in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience
N2  - Several studies (e.g., Wicha et al., 2003b; DeLong et al., 2005) have shown that readers use information from the sentential context to predict nouns (or some of their features), and that predictability effects can be inferred from the EEG signal in determiners or adjectives appearing before the predicted noun. While these findings provide evidence for the pre-activation proposal, recent replication attempts together with inconsistencies in the results from the literature cast doubt on the robustness of this phenomenon. Our study presents the first attempt to use the effect of gender on predictability in German to study the pre-activation hypothesis, capitalizing on the fact that all German nouns have a gender and that their preceding determiners can show an unambiguous gender marking when the noun phrase has accusative case. Despite having a relatively large sample size (of 120 subjects), both our preregistered and exploratory analyses failed to yield conclusive evidence for or against an effect of pre-activation. The sign of the effect is, however, in the expected direction: the more unexpected the gender of the determiner, the larger the negativity. The recent, inconclusive replication attempts by Nieuwland et al. (2018) and others also show effects with signs in the expected direction. We conducted a Bayesian random-ef-fects meta-analysis using our data and the publicly available data from these recent replication attempts. Our meta-analysis shows a relatively clear but very small effect that is consistent with the pre-activation account and demonstrates a very important advantage of the Bayesian data analysis methodology: we can incrementally accumulate evidence to obtain increasingly precise estimates of the effect of interest.
KW  - ERP
KW  - pre-activation
KW  - predictions
KW  - grammatical gender
KW  - Bayesian meta-analysis
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107427
SN  - 0028-3932
SN  - 1873-3514
VL  - 142
PB  - Elsevier Science
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Reifegerste, Jana
A1  - Jarvis, Rebecca
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Effects of chronological age on native and nonnative sentence processing
BT  - evidence from subject-verb agreement in German
JF  - Journal of memory and language
N2  - While much attention has been devoted to the cognition of aging multilingual individuals, little is known about how age affects their grammatical processing. We assessed subject-verb number-agreement processing in sixty native (L1) and sixty non-native (L2) speakers of German (age: 18-84) using a binary-choice sentence-completion task, along with various individual-differences tests. Our results revealed differential effects of age on L1 and L2 speakers' accuracy and reaction times (RTs). L1 speakers' RTs increased with age, and they became more susceptible to attraction errors. In contrast, L2 speakers' RTs decreased, once age-related slowing was controlled for, and their overall accuracy increased. We interpret this as resulting from increased L2 exposure. Moreover, L2 speakers' accuracy/RT patterns were more strongly affected by cognitive variables (working memory, interference control) than L1 speakers'. Our findings show that as regards bilinguals' grammatical processing ability, aging is associated with both gains (in experience) and losses (in cognitive abilities).
KW  - sentence processing
KW  - subject-verb agreement
KW  - attraction errors
KW  - second-language processing
KW  - aging
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104083
SN  - 0749-596X
SN  - 1096-0821
VL  - 111
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam [u.a.]
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Horn, Peter
A1  - Fritzsche, Tom
A1  - Ehlert, Antje
A1  - Adani, Flavia
T1  - Tapping into the interplay of lexical and number knowledge using fast mapping
BT  - a longitudinal eye-tracking study with two-year-olds
JF  - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal
N2  - Language skills and mathematical competencies are argued to influence each other during development. While a relation between the development of vocabulary size and mathematical skills is already documented in the literature, this study further examines how children's ability to map a novel word to an unknown object as well as their ability to retain this word from memory may be related to their knowledge of number words. Twenty-five children were tested longitudinally (at 30 and at 36 months of age) using an eye-tracking-based fast mapping task, the Give-a Number task, and standardized measures of vocabulary. The results reveal that children's ability to create and retain a mental representation of a novel word was related to number knowledge at 30 months, but not at 36 months while vocabulary size correlated with number knowledge only at 36 months. These results show that even specific mapping processes are initially related to the acquisition of number words and they speak for a parallelism between the development of lexical and number-concept knowledge despite their semantic and syntactic differences.
KW  - Number
KW  - Number knowledge
KW  - Cognitive development
KW  - Fast mapping
KW  - Word
KW  - learning
KW  - Cross-domain development
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101573
SN  - 0163-6383
SN  - 1879-0453
VL  - 64
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Fuhrmeister, Pamela
A1  - Madec, Sylvain
A1  - Lorenz, Antje
A1  - Elbuy, Shereen
A1  - Bürki Foschini, Audrey Damaris
T1  - Behavioural and EEG evidence for inter-individual variability in late encoding stages of word production
JF  - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2  - Individuals differ in the time needed to name a picture. This contribution asks whether this inter-individual variability emerges in earlier stages of word production (e.g. lexical selection) or later stages (e.g. articulation) and examines the consequences of this variability for EEG group results. We measured participants' (N = 45) naming latencies and continuous EEG in a picture-word interference task and naming latencies in a delayed naming task. Inter-individual variability in naming latencies in immediate naming (in contrast with inter-item variability) was not larger than the variability in the delayed task, suggesting that some variability in immediate naming originates in later stages of word production. EEG data complemented this interpretation: Differences between relatively fast vs. slow speakers emerged in response-aligned analyses in a time window close to the vocal response. We additionally present a method to assess the generalisability of the timing of effects across participants based on random sampling.
KW  - Word production
KW  - inter-individual variability
KW  - event-related potentials
KW  - picture-word-interference
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2030483
SN  - 2327-3798
SN  - 2327-3801
VL  - 37
IS  - 7
SP  - 902
EP  - 924
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Perugia, Giulia
A1  - Paetzel-Prüsmann, Maike
A1  - Alanenpää, Madelene
A1  - Castellano, Ginevra
T1  - I can see it in your eyes
BT  - Gaze as an implicit cue of uncanniness and task performance in repeated interactions with robots
JF  - Frontiers in robotics and AI
N2  - Over the past years, extensive research has been dedicated to developing robust platforms and data-driven dialog models to support long-term human-robot interactions. However, little is known about how people's perception of robots and engagement with them develop over time and how these can be accurately assessed through implicit and continuous measurement techniques. In this paper, we explore this by involving participants in three interaction sessions with multiple days of zero exposure in between. Each session consists of a joint task with a robot as well as two short social chats with it before and after the task. We measure participants' gaze patterns with a wearable eye-tracker and gauge their perception of the robot and engagement with it and the joint task using questionnaires. Results disclose that aversion of gaze in a social chat is an indicator of a robot's uncanniness and that the more people gaze at the robot in a joint task, the worse they perform. In contrast with most HRI literature, our results show that gaze toward an object of shared attention, rather than gaze toward a robotic partner, is the most meaningful predictor of engagement in a joint task. Furthermore, the analyses of gaze patterns in repeated interactions disclose that people's mutual gaze in a social chat develops congruently with their perceptions of the robot over time. These are key findings for the HRI community as they entail that gaze behavior can be used as an implicit measure of people's perception of robots in a social chat and of their engagement and task performance in a joint task.
KW  - perception of robots
KW  - long-term interaction
KW  - mutual gaze
KW  - engagement
KW  - uncanny valley
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.645956
SN  - 2296-9144
VL  - 8
PB  - Frontiers Media
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Salzmann, Martin
A1  - Wierzba, Marta
A1  - Georgi, Doreen
T1  - Condition C in German A'-movement
BT  - tackling challenges in experimental research on reconstruction
JF  - Journal of linguistics : JL
N2  - In recent experimental work, arguments for or against Condition C reconstruction in A'-movement have been based on low/high availability of coreference in sentences with and without A'-movement. We argue that this reasoning is problematic: It involves arbitrary thresholds, and the results are potentially confounded by the different surface orders of the compared structures and non-syntactic factors. We present three experiments with designs that do not require defining thresholds of 'low' or 'high' coreference values. Instead, we focus on grammatical contrasts (wh-movement vs. relativization, subject vs. object wh-movement) and aim to identify and reduce confounds. The results show that reconstruction for A'-movement of DPs is not very robust in German, contra previous findings. Our results are compatible with the view that the surface order and non-syntactic factors (e.g. plausibility, referential accessibility of an R-expression) heavily influence coreference possibilities. Thus, the data argue against a theory that includes both reconstruction and a hard Condition C constraint. There is a residual contrast between sentences with subject/object movement, which is compatible with an account without reconstruction (and an additional non-syntactic factor) or an account with reconstruction (and a soft Condition C constraint).
KW  - A'-movement
KW  - binding
KW  - Condition C
KW  - experimental syntax
KW  - German
KW  - reconstruction
KW  - relative clauses
KW  - wh-questions
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226722000214
SN  - 0022-2267
SN  - 1469-7742
VL  - 59
IS  - 3
SP  - 577
EP  - 622
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - London [u.a.]
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Stone, Kate
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban
T1  - Does entropy modulate the prediction of German long-distance verb particles?
JF  - PLOS ONE
N2  - In this paper we examine the effect of uncertainty on readers' predictions about meaning. In particular, we were interested in how uncertainty might influence the likelihood of committing to a specific sentence meaning. We conducted two event-related potential (ERP) experiments using particle verbs such as turn down and manipulated uncertainty by constraining the context such that readers could be either highly certain about the identity of a distant verb particle, such as turn the bed [...] down, or less certain due to competing particles, such as turn the music [...] up/down. The study was conducted in German, where verb particles appear clause-finally and may be separated from the verb by a large amount of material. We hypothesised that this separation would encourage readers to predict the particle, and that high certainty would make prediction of a specific particle more likely than lower certainty. If a specific particle was predicted, this would reflect a strong commitment to sentence meaning that should incur a higher processing cost if the prediction is wrong. If a specific particle was less likely to be predicted, commitment should be weaker and the processing cost of a wrong prediction lower. If true, this could suggest that uncertainty discourages predictions via an unacceptable cost-benefit ratio. However, given the clear predictions made by the literature, it was surprisingly unclear whether the uncertainty manipulation affected the two ERP components studied, the N400 and the PNP. Bayes factor analyses showed that evidence for our a priori hypothesised effect sizes was inconclusive, although there was decisive evidence against a priori hypothesised effect sizes larger than 1 mu Vfor the N400 and larger than 3 mu V for the PNP. We attribute the inconclusive finding to the properties of verb-particle dependencies that differ from the verb-noun dependencies in which the N400 and PNP are often studied.
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267813
SN  - 1932-6203
VL  - 17
IS  - 8
PB  - PLOS
CY  - San Francisco, California, US
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - van Ommen, Sandrien
A1  - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie
A1  - Larraza, Saioa
A1  - Wellmann, Caroline
A1  - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Nazzi, Thierry
T1  - Language-specific prosodic acquisition
BT  - a comparison of phrase boundary perception by French- and German-learning infants
JF  - Journal of memory and language: JML
N2  - This study compares the development of prosodic processing in French- and German-learning infants. The emergence of language-specific perception of phrase boundaries was directly tested using the same stimuli across these two languages. French-learning (Experiment 1, 2) and German-learning 6- and 8-month-olds (Experiment 3) listened to the same French noun sequences with or without major prosodic boundaries ([Loulou et Manou] [et Nina]; [Loulou et Manou et Nina], respectively). The boundaries were either naturally cued (Experiment 1), or cued exclusively by pitch and duration (Experiment 2, 3). French-learning 6- and 8-month-olds both perceived the natural boundary, but neither perceived the boundary when only two cues were present. In contrast, German-learning infants develop from not perceiving the two-cue boundary at 6 months to perceiving it at 8 months, just like German-learning 8-month-olds listening to German (Wellmann, Holzgrefe, Truckenbrodt, Wartenburger, & Hohle, 2012). In a control experiment (Experiment 4), we found little difference between German and French adult listeners, suggesting that later, French listeners catch up with German listeners. Taken together, these cross-linguistic differences in the perception of identical stimuli provide direct evidence for language-specific development of prosodic boundary perception.
KW  - Prosody
KW  - Acquisition
KW  - Language-specific
KW  - Perception
KW  - Infant
KW  - Prosodic boundaries
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104108
SN  - 0749-596X
SN  - 1096-0821
VL  - 112
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lialiou, Maria
A1  - Sotiropoulou, Stavroula
A1  - Gafos, Adamantios I.
T1  - Spatiotemporal coordination in word-medial stop-lateral and s-stop clusters of American English
JF  - Phonetica : international journal of phonetic science
N2  - This paper is concerned with the relation between syllabic organization and intersegmental spatiotemporal coordination using Electromagnetic Articulometry recordings from seven speakers of American English (henceforth, English). Whereas previous work on English has focused on word-initial clusters (preceding a vowel whose identity was not systematically varied), the present work examined word-medial clusters /pl, kl, sp, sk/ in the context of three different vowel heights (high, mid, low). Our results provide evidence for a global organization for the segments involved in these cluster-vowel combinations. This is reflected in a number of ways: compression of the prevocalic consonant and reduction of CV timing in the word-medial cluster case compared to its singleton paired word in both stop-lateral and s-stop clusters, early vowel initiation (as permitted by the clusters' phonetic properties), and presence of compensatory relations between phonetic properties of different segments or intersegmental transitions within each cluster. In other words, we find that the global organization presiding over the segments partaking in these word-medial tautosyllabic CCVs is pleiotropic, that is, simultaneously expressed in multiple phonetic exponents rather than via a privileged metric such as c-center stability or any other such given single measure employed in previous works.
KW  - American English
KW  - intersegmental coordination
KW  - s-stop clusters
KW  - stop-lateral clusters
KW  - syllabic structure
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/phon-2021-2010
SN  - 0031-8388
SN  - 1423-0321
VL  - 78
IS  - 5-6
SP  - 385
EP  - 433
PB  - De Gruyter Mouton
CY  - Berlin
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Puebla Antunes, Cecilia
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Discourse Prominence and Antecedent MisRetrieval during Native and Non-Native Pronoun Resolution
JF  - Discours : revue de linguistique, psycholinguistique et informatique
N2  - Previous studies on non-native (L2) anaphor resolution suggest that L2 comprehenders are guided more strongly by discourse-level cues compared to native (L1) comprehenders. Here we examine whether and how a grammatically inappropriate antecedent’s discourse status affects the likelihood of it being considered during L1 and L2 pronoun resolution. We used an interference paradigm to examine how the extrasentential discourse impacts the resolution of German object pronouns. In an eye-tracking-during-reading experiment we examined whether an elaborated local antecedent ruled out by binding Condition B would be mis-retrieved during pronoun resolution, and whether initially introducing this antecedent as the discourse topic would affect the chances of it being mis-retrieved. While both participant groups rejected the inappropriate antecedent in an offline questionnaire irrespective of its discourse prominence, their real-time processing patterns differed. L1 speakers initially mis-retrieved the inappropriate antecedent regardless of its contextual prominence. L1 Russian/L2 German speakers, in contrast, were affected by the antecedent’s discourse status, considering it only when it was discourse-new but not when it had previously been introduced as the discourse topic. Our findings show that L2 comprehenders are highly sensitive to discourse dynamics such as topic shifts, supporting the claim that discourse-level cues are more strongly weighted during L2 compared to L1 processing.
KW  - pronoun resolution
KW  - non-native sentence processing
KW  - discourse
KW  - prominence
KW  - interference
KW  - German
KW  - eye-movement monitoring
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.4000/discours.11720
SN  - 1963-1723
IS  - 29
PB  - Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Maion Recherche
CY  - Paris
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Paape, Dario
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - Estimating the true cost of garden pathing:
BT  - a computational model of latent cognitive processes
JF  - Cognitive science
N2  - What is the processing cost of being garden-pathed by a temporary syntactic ambiguity? We argue that comparing average reading times in garden-path versus non-garden-path sentences is not enough to answer this question. Trial-level contaminants such as inattention, the fact that garden pathing may occur non-deterministically in the ambiguous condition, and "triage" (rejecting the sentence without reanalysis; Fodor & Inoue, 2000) lead to systematic underestimates of the true cost of garden pathing. Furthermore, the "pure" garden-path effect due to encountering an unexpected word needs to be separated from the additional cost of syntactic reanalysis. To get more realistic estimates for the individual processing costs of garden pathing and syntactic reanalysis, we implement a novel computational model that includes trial-level contaminants as probabilistically occurring latent cognitive processes. The model shows a good predictive fit to existing reading time and judgment data. Furthermore, the latent-process approach captures differences between noun phrase/zero complement (NP/Z) garden-path sentences and semantically biased reduced relative clause (RRC) garden-path sentences: The NP/Z garden path occurs nearly deterministically but can be mostly eliminated by adding a comma. By contrast, the RRC garden path occurs with a lower probability, but disambiguation via semantic plausibility is not always effective.
KW  - garden-path effect
KW  - syntactic reanalysis
KW  - multinomial processing tree
KW  - latent processes
KW  - mixture modeling
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13186
SN  - 0364-0213
SN  - 1551-6709
VL  - 46
IS  - 8
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Malden, Mass.
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schad, Daniel
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - The posterior probability of a null hypothesis given a statistically significant result
JF  - The quantitative methods for psychology
N2  - When researchers carry out a null hypothesis significance test, it is tempting to assume that a statistically significant result lowers Prob(H0), the probability of the null hypothesis being true. Technically, such a statement is meaningless for various reasons: e.g., the null hypothesis does not have a probability associated with it. However, it is possible to relax certain assumptions to compute the posterior probability Prob(H0) under repeated sampling. We show in a step-by-step guide that the intuitively appealing belief, that Prob(H0) is low when significant results have been obtained under repeated sampling, is in general incorrect and depends greatly on: (a) the prior probability of the null being true; (b) type-I error rate, (c) type-II error rate, and (d) replication of a result. Through step-by-step simulations using open-source code in the R System of Statistical Computing, we show that uncertainty about the null hypothesis being true often remains high despite a significant result. To help the reader develop intuitions about this common misconception, we provide a Shiny app (https://danielschad.shinyapps.io/probnull/). We expect that this tutorial will help researchers better understand and judge results from null hypothesis significance tests.
KW  - Null hypothesis significance testing
KW  - Bayesian inference
KW  - statistical
KW  - power
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.20982/tqmp.18.2.p011
SN  - 1913-4126
SN  - 2292-1354
VL  - 18
IS  - 2
SP  - 130
EP  - 141
PB  - University of Montreal, Department of Psychology
CY  - Montreal
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Peters, Arne
A1  - van Hattum, Marije
T1  - Pseudonyms as carriers of contextualised threat in 19th-century Irish English threatening notices
JF  - English world-wide : a journal of varieties of English
N2  - This paper explores functions of pseudonyms in written threatening communication from a cognitive sociolinguistic perspective. It addresses the semantic domains present in pseudonyms in a corpus of 19th-century Irish English threatening notices and their cognitive functions in the construction of both cultural-contextualised threat and the threatener's identity. We identify eight semantic domains that are accessed recurrently in order to create threat. Contributing to the notion of threat involves menacing war, violence, darkness and perdition directly, while also constructing a certain persona for the threatener that highlights their motivation, moral superiority, historical, local and circumstantial expertise, and their physical and mental aptitude. We argue that pseudonyms contribute to the deontic force of the threat by accessing cultural categories and schemas as well as conceptual metaphors and metonymies. Finally, we suggest that pseudonyms function as post-positioned semantic frame setters, providing a cognitive lens through which the entire threatening notice must be interpreted.
KW  - pseudonyms
KW  - threatening communication
KW  - Irish English
KW  - persona
KW  - construction
KW  - sociocultural cognition
KW  - context-specificity
KW  - post-positioned semantic frame setters
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00059.pet
SN  - 0172-8865
SN  - 1569-9730
VL  - 42
IS  - 1
SP  - 29
EP  - 53
PB  - John Benjamins Publishing Co.
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Sun, He
A1  - Ng, Siew Chin
A1  - O'Brien, Beth Ann
A1  - Fritzsche, Tom
T1  - Child, family, and school factors in bilingual preschoolers’ vocabulary development in heritage languages
JF  - Journal of Child Language
N2  - Child characteristics, family factors, and preschool factors are all found to affect the rate of bilingual children's vocabulary development in heritage language (HL). However, what remains unknown is the relative importance of these three sets of factors in HL vocabulary growth. The current study explored the complex issue with 457 Singaporean preschool children who are speaking either Mandarin, Malay, or Tamil as their HL. A series of internal factors (e.g., non-verbal intelligence) and external factors (e.g., maternal educational level) were used to predict children's HL vocabulary growth over a year at preschool with linear mixed effects models. The results demonstrated that external factors (i.e., family and preschool factors) are relatively more important than child characteristics in enhancing bilingual children's HL vocabulary growth. Specifically, children's language input quantity (i.e., home language dominance), input quality (e.g., number of books in HL), and HL input quantity at school (i.e., the time between two waves of tests at preschool) predict the participants' HL vocabulary growth, with initial vocabulary controlled. The relative importance of external factors in bilingual children's HL vocabulary development is attributed to the general bilingual setting in Singapore, where HL is taken as a subject to learn at preschool and children have fairly limited exposure to HL in general. The limited amount of input might not suffice to trigger the full expression of internal resources. Our findings suggest the crucial roles that caregivers and preschools play in early HL education, and the necessity of more parental involvement in early HL learning in particular.
KW  - heritage language maintenance
KW  - child characteristics
KW  - input quantity
KW  - language input-poor setting
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000919000904
SN  - 0305-0009
SN  - 1469-7602
VL  - 47
IS  - 4
SP  - 817
EP  - 843
PB  - Cambridge University Press
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lopukhina, Anastasiya
A1  - Lopukhin, Konstantin
A1  - Laurinavichyute, Anna
T1  - Morphosyntactic but not lexical corpus-based probabilities can substitute for cloze probabilities in reading experiments
JF  - PLOS ONE / Public Library of Science
N2  - During reading or listening, people can generate predictions about the lexical and morphosyntactic properties of upcoming input based on available context. Psycholinguistic experiments that study predictability or control for it conventionally rely on a human-based approach and estimate predictability via the cloze task. Our study investigated an alternative corpus-based approach for estimating predictability via language predictability models. We obtained cloze and corpus-based probabilities for all words in 144 Russian sentences, correlated the two measures, and found a strong correlation between them. Importantly, we estimated how much variance in eye movements registered while reading the same sentences was explained by each of the two probabilities and whether the two probabilities explain the same variance. Along with lexical predictability (the activation of a particular word form), we analyzed morphosyntactic predictability (the activation of morphological features of words) and its effect on reading times over and above lexical predictability. We found that for predicting reading times, cloze and corpus-based measures of both lexical and morphosyntactic predictability explained the same amount of variance. However, cloze and corpus-based lexical probabilities both independently contributed to a better model fit, whereas for morphosyntactic probabilities, the contributions of cloze and corpus-based measures were interchangeable. Therefore, morphosyntactic but not lexical corpus-based probabilities can substitute for cloze probabilities in reading experiments. Our results also indicate that in languages with rich inflectional morphology, such as Russian, when people engage in prediction, they are much more successful in predicting isolated morphosyntactic features than predicting the particular lexeme and its full morphosyntactic markup.
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246133
SN  - 1932-6203
VL  - 16
IS  - 1
PB  - PLoS
CY  - San Fransisco
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka
A1  - Nazzi, Thierry
T1  - Variability and stability in early language acquisition
BT  - comparing recognition and bilingual infants' speech perception and word recognition
JF  - Bilingualism : language and cognition
N2  - Many human infants grow up learning more than one language simultaneously but only recently has research started to study early language acquisition in this population more systematically. The paper gives an overview on findings on early language acquisition in bilingual infants during the first two years of life and compares these findings to current knowledge on early language acquisition in monolingual infants. Given the state of the research, the overview focuses on research on phonological and early lexical development in the first two years of life. We will show that the developmental trajectory of early language acquisition in these areas is very similar in mono- and bilingual infants suggesting that these early steps into language are guided by mechanisms that are rather robust against the differences in the conditions of language exposure that mono- and bilingual infants typically experience.
KW  - language acquisition
KW  - bilingual infants
KW  - bilingual phonological
KW  - development
KW  - bilingual lexical development
KW  - simultaneous bilingualism
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000348
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 23
IS  - 1
SP  - 56
EP  - 71
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Sotiropoulou, Stavroula
A1  - Gafos, Adamantios I.
T1  - Phonetic indices of syllabic organization in German stop-lateral clusters
JF  - Laboratory Phonology
N2  - Using articulatory data from five German speakers, we study how segmental sequences under different syllabic organizations respond to perturbations of phonetic parameters in the segments that compose them. Target words contained stop-lateral sequences /bl, gl, kl, pl/ in word-initial and cross-word contexts and were embedded in carrier phrases with different prosodic boundaries, i.e., no phrase boundary versus an utterance phrase boundary preceded the target word in the case of word-initial clusters, or separated the consonants in the case of cross-word sequences. For word-initial cluster (CCV) onsets, we find that increasing C1 stop duration or the lag between two consonants leads to earlier vowel initiation and reduced local timing stability across CV, CCV. Furthermore, as the inter-consonantal lag increases, C2 duration decreases. In contrast, for cross-word C#CV sequences, increasing inter-consonantal lag does not lead to earlier vowel initiation and robust local timing stability is maintained across CV, C#CV. In other words, in CCV sequences within words, local perturbations to segments have effects that ripple through the rest of the sequence. Instead, in cross-word C#CV sequences, local perturbations stay local. Overall, the findings indicate that the effects of phonetic perturbations on coordination patterns depend on the syllabic organization superimposed on these clusters.
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.16995/labphon.6440
SN  - 1868-6346
SN  - 1868-6354
VL  - 13
IS  - 1
PB  - Open Library of humanities
CY  - Cambridge
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie
A1  - Bhatara, Anjali
A1  - Unger, Annika
A1  - Nazzi, Thierry
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Rhythmic grouping biases in simultaneous bilinguals
JF  - Bilingualism : language and cognition
N2  - This study provides a novel approach for testing the universality of perceptual biases by looking at speech processing in simultaneous bilingual adults learning two languages that support the maintenance of this bias to different degrees. Specifically, we investigated the Iambic/Trochaic Law, an assumed universal grouping bias, in simultaneous French-German bilinguals, presenting them with streams of syllables varying in intensity, duration or neither and asking them whether they perceived them as strong-weak or weak-strong groupings. Results showed robust, consistent grouping preferences. A comparison to monolinguals from previous studies revealed that they pattern with German-speaking monolinguals, and differ from French-speaking monolinguals. The distribution of simultaneous bilinguals' individual performance was best explained by a model fitting a unimodal (not bimodal) distribution, failing to support two subgroups of language dominance. Moreover, neither language experience nor language context predicted their performance. These findings suggest a special role for universal biases in simultaneous bilinguals.
KW  - simultaneous bilingualism
KW  - universal bias
KW  - rhythm
KW  - rhythmic grouping
KW  - Iambic
KW  - Trochaic Law
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728920000140
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 23
IS  - 5
SP  - 1070
EP  - 1081
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schreiber, Alexander
A1  - Onea Gáspár, Edgar
T1  - Are narrow focus exhaustivity inferences Bayesian inferences?
JF  - Frontiers in psychology / Frontiers Research Foundation
N2  - In successful communication, the literal meaning of linguistic utterances is often enriched by pragmatic inferences. Part of the pragmatic reasoning underlying such inferences has been successfully modeled as Bayesian goal recognition in the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In this paper, we try to model the interpretation of question-answer sequences with narrow focus in the answer in the RSA framework, thereby exploring the effects of domain size and prior probabilities on interpretation. Should narrow focus exhaustivity inferences be actually based on Bayesian inference involving prior probabilities of states, RSA models should predict a dependency of exhaustivity on these factors. We present experimental data that suggest that interlocutors do not act according to the predictions of the RSA model and that exhaustivity is in fact approximately constant across different domain sizes and priors. The results constitute a conceptual challenge for Bayesian accounts of the underlying pragmatic inferences.
KW  - pragmatics
KW  - Bayesian models
KW  - rational speech act models
KW  - implicatures
KW  - focus
KW  - exhaustivity
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.677223
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 12
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pañeda, Claudia
A1  - Lago, Sol
A1  - Vares, Elena
A1  - Veríssimo, João Marques
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Island effects in Spanish comprehension
JF  - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics
N2  - A growing body of experimental syntactic research has revealed substantial variation in the magnitude of island effects, not only across languages but also across different grammatical constructions. Adopting a well-established experimental design, the present study examines island effects in Spanish using a speeded acceptability judgment task. To quantify variation across grammatical constructions, we tested extraction from four different types of structure (subjects, complex noun phrases, adjuncts and interrogative clauses). The results of Bayesian mixed effects modelling showed that the size of island effects varied between constructions, such that there was clear evidence of subject, adjunct and interrogative island effects, but not of complex noun phrase island effects. We also failed to find evidence that island effects were modulated by participants' working memory capacity as measured by an operation span task. To account for our results, we suggest that variability in island effects across constructions may be due to the interaction of syntactic, semantic-pragmatic and processing factors, which may affect island types differentially due to their idiosyncratic properties.
KW  - extraction islands
KW  - Spanish
KW  - reading comprehension
KW  - working memory
KW  - sentence processing
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1058
SN  - 2397-1835
VL  - 5
IS  - 1
PB  - Open Library of Humanities
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Reifegerste, Jana
T1  - The effects of aging on bilingual language
BT  - what changes, what doesn't, and why
JF  - Bilingualism : language and cognition
N2  - Substantial research has examined cognition in aging bilinguals. However, less work has investigated the effects of aging on language itself in bilingualism. In this article I comprehensively review prior research on this topic, and interpret the evidence in light of current theories of aging and theories of bilingualism. First, aging indeed appears to affect bilinguals' language performance, though there is considerable variability in the trajectory across adulthood (declines, age-invariance, and improvements) and in the extent to which these trajectories resemble those found in monolinguals. I argue that these age effects are likely explained by the key opposing forces of increasing experience and cognitive declines in aging. Second, consistent with some theoretical work on bilingual language processing, the grammatical processing mechanisms do not seem to change between younger and older bilingual adults, even after decades of immersion. I conclude by discussing how future research can further advance the field.
KW  - aging
KW  - bilingualism
KW  - second language
KW  - lexical processing
KW  - grammatical
KW  - processing
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728920000413
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 24
IS  - 1
SP  - 1
EP  - 17
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Mühlenbeck, Cordelia Anna
A1  - Pritsch, Carla
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
A1  - Telkemeyer, Silke
A1  - Liebal, Katja
T1  - Attentional bias to facial expressions of different emotions
BT  - a cross-cultural comparison of ≠Akhoe Hai||om and German children and adolescents
JF  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - The attentional bias to negative information enables humans to quickly identify and to respond appropriately to potentially threatening situations. Because of its adaptive function, the enhanced sensitivity to negative information is expected to represent a universal trait, shared by all humans regardless of their cultural background. However, existing research focuses almost exclusively on humans from Western industrialized societies, who are not representative for the human species. Therefore, we compare humans from two distinct cultural contexts: adolescents and children from Germany, a Western industrialized society, and from the not equal Akhoe Hai parallel to om, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers in Namibia. We predicted that both groups show an attentional bias toward negative facial expressions as compared to neutral or positive faces. We used eye-tracking to measure their fixation duration on facial expressions depicting different emotions, including negative (fear, anger), positive (happy), and neutral faces. Both Germans and the not equal Akhoe Hai parallel to om gazed longer at fearful faces, but shorter on angry faces, challenging the notion of a general bias toward negative emotions. For happy faces, fixation durations varied between the two groups, suggesting more flexibility in the response to positive emotions. Our findings emphasize the need for placing research on emotion perception into an evolutionary, cross-cultural comparative framework that considers the adaptive significance of specific emotions, rather than differentiating between positive and negative information, and enables systematic comparisons across participants from diverse cultural backgrounds.
KW  - attentional bias
KW  - fear bias
KW  - emotions
KW  - facial expressions
KW  - cross-cultural comparison
KW  - not equal Akhoe Hai parallel to om
KW  - Germans
KW  - adolescents
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00795
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 11
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - Gelman, Andrew
T1  - How to embrace variation and accept uncertainty in linguistic and psycholinguistic data analysis
JF  - Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences
N2  - The use of statistical inference in linguistics and related areas like psychology typically involves a binary decision: either reject or accept some null hypothesis using statistical significance testing. When statistical power is low, this frequentist data-analytic approach breaks down: null results are uninformative, and effect size estimates associated with significant results are overestimated. Using an example from psycholinguistics, several alternative approaches are demonstrated for reporting inconsistencies between the data and a theoretical prediction. The key here is to focus on committing to a falsifiable prediction, on quantifying uncertainty statistically, and learning to accept the fact that - in almost all practical data analysis situations - we can only draw uncertain conclusions from data, regardless of whether we manage to obtain statistical significance or not. A focus on uncertainty quantification is likely to lead to fewer excessively bold claims that, on closer investigation, may turn out to be not supported by the data.
KW  - experimental linguistics
KW  - statistical data analysis
KW  - statistical
KW  - inference
KW  - uncertainty quantification
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2019-0051
SN  - 0024-3949
SN  - 1613-396X
VL  - 59
IS  - 5
SP  - 1311
EP  - 1342
PB  - De Gruyter Mouton
CY  - Berlin
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hein, Johannes
A1  - Murphy, Andrew
T1  - VP-nominalization and the Final-over-Final Condition
JF  - Linguistic inquiry
N2  - The Final-over-Final Condition has emerged as a robust and explanatory generalization for a wide range of phenomena (Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts 2014, Sheehan et al. 2017). In this article, we argue that it also holds in another domain, nominalization. In languages that show overt nominalization of VPs, one word order is routinely unattested, namely, a head-initial VP with a suffixal nominalizer. This typological gap can be accounted for by the Final-over-Final Condition, if we allow it to hold within mixed extended projections. This view also makes correct predictions about agentive nominalizations and nominalized serial verb constructions.
KW  - Final-over-Final Condition
KW  - nominalization
KW  - extended projections
KW  - word
KW  - order
KW  - serial verb constructions
KW  - syntax
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00407
SN  - 0024-3892
SN  - 1530-9150
VL  - 53
IS  - 2
SP  - 337
EP  - 370
PB  - MIT Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Mazzarella, Diana
A1  - Gotzner, Nicole
T1  - The polarity asymmetry of negative strengthening
BT  - dissociating adjectival polarity from face-threatening potential
JF  - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics
N2  - The interpretation of negated antonyms is characterised by a polarity asymmetry: the negation of a positive polarity antonym (X is not interesting) is more likely to be strengthened to convey its opposite ('X is uninteresting') than the negation of a negative polarity antonym (X is not uninteresting to convey that 'X is interesting') is. A classical explanation of this asymmetry relies on face-management. Since the predication of a negative polarity antonym (X is uninteresting) is potentially face-threatening in most contexts, the negation of the corresponding positive polarity antonym (X is not interesting) is more likely to be interpreted as an indirect strategy to minimise face-threat while getting the message across. We present two experimental studies in which we test the predictions of this explanation. In contrast with it, our results show that adjectival polarity, but not face-threatening potential, appears to be responsible for the asymmetric interpretation of negated antonyms.
KW  - negation
KW  - polarity
KW  - antonyms
KW  - negative strengthening
KW  - politeness
KW  - face
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1342
SN  - 2397-1835
VL  - 6
IS  - 1
PB  - Open Library of Humanities
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hohaus, Vera
A1  - Zimmermann, Malte
T1  - Comparisons of equality with German so ... wie, and the relationship between degrees and properties
JF  - Journal of semantics
N2  - We present a compositionally transparent, unified semantic analysis of two kinds of so ... wie-equative constructions in German, namely degree equatives and property equatives in the domain of individuals or events. Unlike in English and many other European languages (Haspelmath & Buchholz 1998, Rett 2013), both equative types in German feature the parameter marker so, suggesting a unified analysis. We show that the parallel formal expression of German degree and property equatives is accompanied by a parallel syntactic distribution (in predicative, attributive, and adverbial position), and by identical semantic properties: Both equative types allow for scope ambiguities, show negative island effects out of context, and license the negative polarity item uberhaupt 'at all' in the complement clause. As the same properties are also shared by German comparatives, we adopt the influential quantificational analysis of comparatives in von Stechow (1984ab), Heim (1985, 2001, 2007), and Beck (2011), and treat both German equative types in a uniform manner as expressing universal quantification over sets of degrees or over sets of properties (of individuals or events). Conceptually, the uniform marking of degree-related and property-related meanings is expected given that the abstract semantic category degree (type ) can be reconstructed in terms of equivalence classes, i.e., ontologically simpler sets of individuals (type ) or events (type ). These are found in any language, showing that whether or not a language makes explicit reference to degrees (by means of gradable adjectives, degree question words, degree-only equatives) does not follow on general conceptual or semantic grounds, but is determined by the grammar of that language.
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffaa011
SN  - 0167-5133
SN  - 1477-4593
VL  - 38
IS  - 1
SP  - 95
EP  - 143
PB  - Oxford Univ. Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Paape, Dario
A1  - Avetisyan, Serine
A1  - Lago, Sol
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - Modeling misretrieval and feature substitution in agreement attraction
BT  - a computational evaluation
JF  - Cognitive science
N2  - We present computational modeling results based on a self-paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k-fold cross-validation. We find that our data are better accounted for by an encoding-based model of agreement attraction, compared to a retrieval-based model. A novel methodological contribution of our study is the use of comprehension questions with open-ended responses, so that both misinterpretation of the number feature of the subject phrase and misassignment of the thematic subject role of the verb can be investigated at the same time. We find evidence for both types of misinterpretation in our study, sometimes in the same trial. However, the specific error patterns in our data are not fully consistent with any previously proposed model.
KW  - Agreement attraction
KW  - Eastern Armenian
KW  - Self-paced reading
KW  - Computational modeling
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13019
SN  - 0364-0213
SN  - 1551-6709
VL  - 45
IS  - 8
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Malden, Mass.
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Korochkina, Maria
A1  - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris
A1  - Nickels, Lyndsey
T1  - Apples and oranges
BT  - how does learning context affect novel word learning?
JF  - Journal of memory and language : JML
N2  - Despite scarce empirical evidence, introducing new vocabulary in semantic categories has long been standard in second language teaching. We examined the effect of learning context on encoding, immediate recall and integration of new vocabulary into semantic memory by contrasting categorically related (novel names for familiar concepts blocked by semantic category) and unrelated (mixed semantic categories) learning contexts. Two learning sessions were conducted 24 hours apart, with each participant exposed to both contexts. Subsequently, a test phase examined picture naming, translation and picture-word interference tasks. Compared to the unrelated context, the categorically related context resulted in poorer naming accuracy in the learning phase, slower response latencies at the immediate recall tasks and greater semantic interference in the picture-word interference task (picture naming in L1 with semantically related novel word distractors). We develop a theoretical account of word learning that attributes observed differences to episodic rather than semantic memory.
KW  - Word learning
KW  - Learning context
KW  - Episodic memory
KW  - Semantic memory
KW  - Integration
KW  - Word production
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2021.104246
SN  - 0749-596X
SN  - 1096-0821
VL  - 120
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Mertzen, Daniela
A1  - Lago, Sol
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - The benefits of preregistration for hypothesis-driven bilingualism research
JF  - Bilingualism : language and cognition
N2  - Preregistration is an open science practice that requires the specification of research hypotheses and analysis plans before the data are inspected. Here, we discuss the benefits of preregistration for hypothesis-driven, confirmatory bilingualism research. Using examples from psycholinguistics and bilingualism, we illustrate how non-peer reviewed preregistrations can serve to implement a clean distinction between hypothesis testing and data exploration. This distinction helps researchers avoid casting post-hoc hypotheses and analyses as confirmatory ones. We argue that, in keeping with current best practices in the experimental sciences, preregistration, along with sharing data and code, should be an integral part of hypothesis-driven bilingualism research.
KW  - preregistration
KW  - open science
KW  - bilingualism
KW  - psycholinguistics
KW  - confirmatory analysis
KW  - exploratory analysis
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921000031
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 24
IS  - 5
SP  - 807
EP  - 812
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ghaffarvand-Mokari, Payam
A1  - Gafos, Adamantios I.
A1  - Williams, Daniel
T1  - Perceptuomotor compatibility effects in vowels
BT  - beyond phonemic identity
JF  - Attention, perception, & psychophysics
N2  - Perceptuomotor compatibility between phonemically identical spoken and perceived syllables has been found to speed up response times (RTs) in speech production tasks. However, research on compatibility effects between perceived and produced stimuli at the subphonemic level is limited. Using a cue-distractor task, we investigated the effects of phonemic and subphonemic congruency in pairs of vowels. On each trial, a visual cue prompted individuals to produce a response vowel, and after the visual cue appeared a distractor vowel was auditorily presented while speakers were planning to produce the response vowel. The results revealed effects on RTs due to phonemic congruency (same vs. different vowels) between the response and distractor vowels, which resemble effects previously seen for consonants. Beyond phonemic congruency, we assessed how RTs are modulated as a function of the degree of subphonemic similarity between the response and distractor vowels. Higher similarity between the response and distractor in terms of phonological distance-defined by number of mismatching phonological features-resulted in faster RTs. However, the exact patterns of RTs varied across response-distractor vowel pairs. We discuss how different assumptions about phonological feature representations may account for the different patterns observed in RTs across response-distractor pairs. Our findings on the effects of perceived stimuli on produced speech at a more detailed level of representation than phonemic identity necessitate a more direct and specific formulation of the perception-production link. Additionally, these results extend previously reported perceptuomotor interactions mainly involving consonants to vowels.
KW  - speech perception
KW  - speech production
KW  - psycholinguistics
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-02014-1
SN  - 1943-3921
SN  - 1943-393X
VL  - 82
IS  - 5
SP  - 2751
EP  - 2764
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Behzadnia, Ali
A1  - Rad, Mehdi Mehrani
T1  - Young children’s activity involvement and responses to yes/no questions
JF  - Journal of psycholinguistic research
N2  - In the present study, we investigated younger and older Persian preschoolers' response tendency and accuracy toward yes/no questions about a coloring activity. Overall, 107 three- to four-year-olds and five- to six-year-old children were asked positive and negative yes/no questions about a picture coloring activity. The questions focused on three question contents namely, actions, environment and person. As for children's response tendency, they showed a compliance tendency. That is, they provided yes and no responses to positively and negatively formed questions respectively. Children especially younger ones were more compliant toward positive questions and their tendency decreased by age. In addition, the results revealed children's highest rate of compliance tendency toward environment inquiries. Concerning response accuracy, the effects of age and question content were significant. Specifically, older children provided more accurate responses than their younger counterparts, especially to yes/no questions asked about the actions performed during the activity. The findings suggest that depending on the format and the content of yes/no questions younger and older children's response accuracy and tendency differ.
KW  - compliance tendency
KW  - response accuracy
KW  - suggestibility
KW  - yes
KW  - no
KW  - questions
KW  - young children
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-019-09685-4
SN  - 0090-6905
SN  - 1573-6555
VL  - 49
IS  - 3
SP  - 401
EP  - 414
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pfeiffer, Martin
A1  - Weiss, Clarissa
T1  - Reenactments during tellings
BT  - using gaze for initiating reenactments, switching roles and representing events
JF  - Journal of pragmatics : an interdisciplinary journal of language studies
N2  - In this paper, we draw on German dyadic face-to-face conversations among friends in order to examine the interactional functions of gaze in reenactments, i.e. "re-presentations or depictions" (Sidnell, 2006: 377) of previously experienced or imagined events. Firstly, we show that reenactors use several different gaze patterns depending on whether the depicted original event is dialogic or non-dialogic. Secondly, we compare the use of different resources for initiating reenactments and switching roles during reenactments with regard to the interactional function of the different alternatives. Specifically, we describe a multimodal practice for switching characters during reenactments that are designed to invite laughter. In sum, the findings add to our knowledge about the various communicative functions of gaze in social interaction.
KW  - Gaze
KW  - Gesture
KW  - Prosody
KW  - Quotative
KW  - Reenactment
KW  - Storytelling
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.11.017
SN  - 0378-2166
SN  - 1879-1387
VL  - 189
SP  - 92
EP  - 113
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gotzner, Nicole
A1  - Romoli, Jacopo
T1  - Meaning and alternatives
JF  - Annual review of linguistics
N2  - Alternatives and competition in language are pervasive at all levels of linguistic analysis. More specifically, alternatives have been argued to play a prominent role in an ever-growing class of phenomena in the investigation of natural language meaning. In this article, we focus on scalar implicatures, as they are arguably the most paradigmatic case of an alternative-based phenomenon. We first review the main challenge for theories of alternatives, the so-called symmetry problem, and we briefly discuss how it has shaped the different approaches to alternatives. We then turn to two more recent challenges concerning scalar diversity and the inferences of sentences with multiple scalars. Finally, we describe several related alternative-based phenomena and recent conceptual approaches to alternatives. As we discuss, while important progress has been made, much more work is needed both on the theoretical side and on understanding the empirical landscape better.
KW  - alternatives
KW  - scalar implicatures
KW  - symmetry problem
KW  - focus
KW  - polarity
KW  - sensitivity
KW  - negative strengthening
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031220-012013
SN  - 2333-9691
SN  - 2333-9683
VL  - 8
SP  - 213
EP  - 234
PB  - Annual Reviews
CY  - Palo Alto
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Paetzel-Prüsmann, Maike
A1  - Perugia, Giulia
A1  - Castellano, Ginevra
T1  - The influence of robot personality on the development of uncanny feelings
JF  - Computers in human behavior
N2  - Empirical investigations on the uncanny valley have almost solely focused on the analysis of people?s noninteractive perception of a robot at first sight. Recent studies suggest, however, that these uncanny first impressions may be significantly altered over an interaction. What is yet to discover is whether certain interaction patterns can lead to a faster decline in uncanny feelings. In this paper, we present a study in which participants with limited expertise in Computer Science played a collaborative geography game with a Furhat robot. During the game, Furhat displayed one of two personalities, which corresponded to two different interaction strategies. The robot was either optimistic and encouraging, or impatient and provocative. We performed the study in a science museum and recruited participants among the visitors. Our findings suggest that a robot that is rated high on agreeableness, emotional stability, and conscientiousness can indeed weaken uncanny feelings. This study has important implications for human-robot interaction design as it further highlights that a first impression, merely based on a robot?s appearance, is not indicative of the affinity people might develop towards it throughout an interaction. We thus argue that future work should emphasize investigations on exact interaction patterns that can help to overcome uncanny feelings.
KW  - Human-robot interaction
KW  - Uncanny valley
KW  - Robot personality
KW  - Human
KW  - perception of robots
KW  - Crowd-sourcing
KW  - Multimodal behavior
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106756
SN  - 0747-5632
SN  - 1873-7692
VL  - 120
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Jäger, Lena Ann
A1  - Mertzen, Daniela
A1  - Van Dyke, Julie A.
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - Interference patterns in subject-verb agreement and reflexives revisited
BT  - a large-sample study
JF  - Journal of memory and language
N2  - Cue-based retrieval theories in sentence processing predict two classes of interference effect: (i) Inhibitory interference is predicted when multiple items match a retrieval cue: cue-overloading leads to an overall slowdown in reading time; and (ii) Facilitatory interference arises when a retrieval target as well as a distractor only partially match the retrieval cues; this partial matching leads to an overall speedup in retrieval time. Inhibitory interference effects are widely observed, but facilitatory interference apparently has an exception: reflexives have been claimed to show no facilitatory interference effects. Because the claim is based on underpowered studies, we conducted a large-sample experiment that investigated both facilitatory and inhibitory interference. In contrast to previous studies, we find facilitatory interference effects in reflexives. We also present a quantitative evaluation of the cue-based retrieval model of Engelmann, Jager, and Vasishth (2019).
KW  - Sentence processing
KW  - Cue-based retrieval
KW  - Similarity-based interference
KW  - Reflexives
KW  - Agreement
KW  - Bayesian data analysis
KW  - Replication
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104063
SN  - 0749-596X
SN  - 1096-0821
VL  - 111
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gotzner, Nicole
A1  - Spalek, Katharina
T1  - Expectations about upcoming discourse referents
BT  - Effects of pitch accents and focus particles in German language production
JF  - International review of pragmatics : IRP
N2  - In the current study, we explore how different information-structural devices affect which referents conversational partners expect in the upcoming discourse. Our main research question is how pitch accents (H*, L+H*) and focus particles (German nur `only' and auch 'also') affect speakers' choices to mention focused referents, previously mentioned alternatives or new, inferable alternatives. Participants in our experiment were presented with short discourses involving two referents and were asked to orally produce two sentences that continue the story. An analysis of speakers' continuations showed that participants were most likely to mention a contextual alternative in the condition with only and the L+H* conditions, followed by H* conditions. In the condition with also, in turn, participants mentioned both the focused/accented referent and the contextual alternative. Our findings highlight the importance of information structure for discourse management and suggest that speakers take activated alternatives to be relevant for an unfolding discourse.
KW  - information structure
KW  - linguistics focus
KW  - pitch accents
KW  - focus
KW  - alternatives
KW  - discourse expectations
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-01401003
SN  - 1877-3095
SN  - 1877-3109
VL  - 14
IS  - 1
SP  - 77
EP  - 94
PB  - Brill
CY  - Leiden
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schlickewei, Ole
A1  - Nienstedt, Julie Cläre
A1  - Frank, Ulrike
A1  - Fründt, Odette
A1  - Pötter-Nerger, Monika
A1  - Gerloff, Christian
A1  - Buhmann, Carsten
A1  - Müller, Frank
A1  - Lezius, Susanne
A1  - Koseki, Jana-Christiane
A1  - Pflug, Christina
T1  - The ability of the eating assessment tool‑10 to detect penetration and aspiration in Parkinson’s disease
JF  - European archives of oto-rhino-laryngology and head & neck
N2  - Purpose:
Dysphagia is common in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and often leads to pneumonia, malnutrition, and reduced quality of life. This study investigates the ability of the Eating Assessment Tool-10 (EAT-10), an established, easy self-administered screening tool, to detect aspiration in PD patients. This study aims to validate the ability of the EAT-10 to detect FEES-proven aspiration in patients with PD.

Methods:
In a controlled prospective cross-sectional study, a total of 50 PD patients completed the EAT-10 and, subsequently, were examined by Flexible Endoscopic Evaluation of Swallowing (FEES) to determine the swallowing status. The results were rated through the Penetration-Aspiration Scale (PAS) and data were analyzed retrospectively. 

Results:
PAS and EAT-10 did not correlate significantly. Selected items of the EAT-10 could not predict aspiration or residues. 19 (38%) out of 50 patients with either penetration or aspiration were not detected by the EAT-10. The diagnostic accuracy was established at only a sufficient level (AUC 0.65). An optimal cut-off value of >= 6 presented a sensitivity of 58% and specificity of 82%.

Conclusions:
The EAT-10 is not suited for the detection of penetration and aspiration in PD patients. Therefore, it cannot be used as a screening method in this patient population. There is still a need for a valid, simple, and efficient screening tool to assist physicians in their daily diagnostics and to avoid clinical complications.
KW  - Parkinson's disease
KW  - dysphagia
KW  - questionnaire
KW  - screening
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00405-020-06377-x
SN  - 0937-4477
SN  - 1434-4726
VL  - 278
IS  - 5
SP  - 1661
EP  - 1668
PB  - Springer
CY  - Berlin
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Krasotkina, Anna
A1  - Götz, Antonia
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Schwarzer, Gudrun
T1  - Bimodal familiarization re-sensitizes 12-month-old infants to other-race faces
JF  - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal
N2  - Perceptual narrowing in the domain of face perception typically begins to reduce infants' sensitivity to differences distinguishing other-race faces from approximately 6 months of age. The present study investigated whether it is possible to re-sensitize Caucasian 12-month-old infants to other-race Asian faces through statistical learning by familiarizing them with different statistical distributions of these faces. The familiarization faces were created by generating a morphed continuum from one Asian face identity to another. In the unimodal condition, infants were familiarized with a frequency distribution wherein they saw the midpoint face of the morphed continuum the most frequently. In the bimodal condition, infants were familiarized with a frequency distribution wherein they saw faces closer to the endpoints of the morphed continuum the most frequently. After familiarization, infants were tested on their discrimination of the two original Asian faces. The infants' looking times during the test indicated that infants in the bimodal condition could discriminate between the two faces, while infants in the unimodal condition could not. These findings therefore suggest that 12-month-old Caucasian infants could be re-sensitized to Asian faces by familiarizing them with a bimodal frequency distribution of such faces.
KW  - Bimodal
KW  - Unimodal
KW  - Familiarization
KW  - Statistical learning
KW  - Infant
KW  - Face
KW  - discrimination
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2020.101502
SN  - 0163-6383
SN  - 1879-0453
VL  - 62
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Fanselow, Gisbert
A1  - Zimmermann, Malte
A1  - Philipp, Mareike
T1  - Assessing the availability of inverse scope in German in the covered box paradigm
JF  - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics
N2  - This paper presents the results of a novel experimental approach to relative quantifier scope in German that elicits data in an indirect manner. Applying the covered-box method (Huang et al. 2013) to scope phenomena, we show that inverse scope is available to some extent in the free constituent order language German, thereby validating earlier findings on other syntactic configurations in German (Rado & Bott 2018) and empirical claims on other free constituent order languages (Japanese, Russian, Hindi), as well as recent corpus findings in Webelhuth (2020). Moreover, the results of the indirect covered-box experiment replicate findings from an earlier direct-query experiment with comparable target items, in which participants were asked directly about the availability of surface scope and inverse scope readings. The configuration of interest consisted of canonical transitive clauses with deaccented existential subject and universal object QPs, in which the restriction of the universal QP was controlled for by the context.
KW  - inverse scope
KW  - covered-box
KW  - free constituent order
KW  - German
KW  - experimental semantics
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5766
SN  - 2397-1835
VL  - 7
IS  - 1
SP  - 1
EP  - 24
PB  - Open Library of Humanities
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Avetisyan, Serine
A1  - Lago, Sol
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - Does case marking affect agreement attraction in comprehension?
JF  - Journal of memory and language
N2  - Previous studies have suggested that distinctive case marking on noun phrases reduces attraction effects in production, i.e., the tendency to produce a verb that agrees with a nonsubject noun. An important open question is whether attraction effects are modulated by case information in sentence comprehension. To address this question, we conducted three attraction experiments in Armenian, a language with a rich and productive case system. The experiments showed clear attraction effects, and they also revealed an overall role of case marking such that participants showed faster response and reading times when the nouns in the sentence had different case. However, we found little indication that distinctive case marking modulated attraction effects. We present a theoretical proposal of how case and number information may be used differentially during agreement licensing in comprehension. More generally, this work sheds light on the nature of the retrieval cues deployed when completing morphosyntactic dependencies.
KW  - subject-verb agreement
KW  - attraction
KW  - Case
KW  - Eastern Armenian
KW  - cue-based
KW  - retrieval
KW  - comprehension
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104087
SN  - 0749-596X
SN  - 1096-0821
VL  - 112
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris
A1  - Viebahn, Malte Clemens
A1  - Gafos, Adamantios I.
T1  - Plasticity and transfer in the sound system
BT  - exposure to syllables in production or perception changes their subsequent production
JF  - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2  - This study focuses on the ability of the adult sound system to reorganise as a result of experience. Participants were exposed to existing and novel syllables in either a listening task or a production task over the course of two days. On the third day, they named disyllabic pseudowords while their electroencephalogram was recorded. The first syllable of these pseudowords had either been trained in the auditory modality, trained in production or had not been trained. The EEG response differed between existing and novel syllables for untrained but not for trained syllables, indicating that training novel sound sequences modifies the processes involved in the production of these sequences to make them more similar to those underlying the production of existing sound sequences. Effects of training on the EEG response were observed both after production training and mere auditory exposure.
KW  - Language production
KW  - EEG
KW  - syllables
KW  - phonetic encoding
KW  - transfer
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2020.1782445
SN  - 2327-3798
SN  - 2327-3801
VL  - 35
IS  - 10
SP  - 1371
EP  - 1393
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Czapka, Sophia
A1  - Festman, Julia
T1  - Wisconsin Card Sorting Test reveals a monitoring advantage but not a switching advantage in multilingual children
JF  - Journal of experimental child psychology : JECP
N2  - The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is used to test higher-level executive functions or switching, depending on the measures chosen in a study and its goal. Many measures can be extracted from the WCST, but how to assign them to specific cognitive skills remains unclear. Thus, the current study first aimed at identifying which measures test the same cognitive abilities. Second, we compared the performance of mono- and multilingual children in the identified abilities because there is some evidence that bilingualism can improve executive functions. We tested 66 monolingual and 56 multilingual (i.e., bi- and trilingual) primary school children (M-age = 109 months) in an online version of the classic WCST. A principal component analysis revealed four factors: problem-solving, monitoring, efficient errors, and perseverations. Because the assignment of measures to factors is only partially coherent across the literature, we identified this as one of the sources of task impurity. In the second part, we calculated regression analyses to test for group differences while controlling for intelligence as a predictor for executive functions and for confounding variables such as age, German lexicon size, and socioeconomic status. Intelligence predicted problem solving and perseverations. In the monitoring component (measured by the reaction times preceding a rule switch), multilinguals outperformed monolinguals, thereby supporting the view that bi- or multilingualism can improve processing speed related to monitoring.
KW  - Executive functions
KW  - Switching
KW  - Monitoring
KW  - Multilingualism
KW  - Factor
KW  - analysis
KW  - Bilingual advantage
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2020.105038
SN  - 0022-0965
SN  - 1096-0457
VL  - 204
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Stone, Kate
A1  - Nicenboim, Bruno
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - Rösler, Frank
T1  - Understanding the effects of constraint and predictability in ERP
JF  - Neurobiology of language
N2  - Intuitively, strongly constraining contexts should lead to stronger probabilistic representations of sentences in memory. Encountering unexpected words could therefore be expected to trigger costlier shifts in these representations than expected words. However, psycholinguistic measures commonly used to study probabilistic processing, such as the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, are sensitive to word predictability but not to contextual constraint. Some research suggests that constraint-related processing cost may be measurable via an ERP positivity following the N400, known as the anterior post-N400 positivity (PNP). The PNP is argued to reflect update of a sentence representation and to be distinct from the posterior P600, which reflects conflict detection and reanalysis. However, constraint-related PNP findings are inconsistent. We sought to conceptually replicate Federmeier et al. (2007) and Kuperberg et al. (2020), who observed that the PNP, but not the N400 or the P600, was affected by constraint at unexpected but plausible words. Using a pre-registered design and statistical approach maximising power, we demonstrated a dissociated effect of predictability and constraint: strong evidence for predictability but not constraint in the N400 window, and strong evidence for constraint but not predictability in the later window. However, the constraint effect was consistent with a P600 and not a PNP, suggesting increased conflict between a strong representation and unexpected input rather than greater update of the representation. We conclude that either a simple strong/weak constraint design is not always sufficient to elicit the PNP, or that previous PNP constraint findings could be an artifact of smaller sample size.
KW  - N400
KW  - anterior PNP
KW  - posterior P600
KW  - probabilistic processing
KW  - constraint
KW  - predictability
KW  - entropy
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00094
SN  - 2641-4368
VL  - 4
IS  - 2
SP  - 221
EP  - 256
PB  - MIT Press
CY  - Cambridge, MA, USA
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Paape, Dario
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban
T1  - Quadruplex negatio invertit?
BT  - the on-line processing of depth charge sentences
JF  - Journal of semantics
N2  - So-called "depth charge" sentences (No head injury is too trivial to be ignored) are interpreted by the vast majority of speakers to mean the opposite of what their compositional semantics would dictate. The semantic inversion that is observed for sentences of this type is the strongest and most persistent linguistic illusion known to the field (Wason & Reich, 1979). However, it has recently been argued that the preferred interpretation arises not because of a prevailing failure of the processing system, but rather because the non-compositional meaning is grammaticalized in the form of a stored construction (Cook & Stevenson, 2010; Fortuin, 2014). In a series of five experiments, we investigate whether the depth charge effect is better explained by processing failure due to memory overload (the overloading hypothesis) or by the existence of an underlying grammaticalized construction with two available meanings (the ambiguity hypothesis). To our knowledge, our experiments are the first to explore the on-line processing profile of depth charge sentences. Overall, the data are consistent with specific variants of the ambiguity and overloading hypotheses while providing evidence against other variants. As an extension of the overloading hypothesis, we suggest two heuristic processes that may ultimately yield the incorrect reading when compositional processing is suspended for strategic reasons.
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffaa009
SN  - 0167-5133
SN  - 1477-4593
VL  - 37
IS  - 4
SP  - 509
EP  - 555
PB  - Oxford Univ. Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ren, Jie
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - The interplay between language acquisition and cognitive development
JF  - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal
KW  - Language Acquisition
KW  - Cognitive Development
KW  - Infancy
KW  - Cross-domain
KW  - Development
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101718
SN  - 0163-6383
SN  - 1879-0453
SN  - 1934-8800
VL  - 67
PB  - Elsevier Science
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Stone, Kate
A1  - von der Malsburg, Titus  Raban
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - The effect of decay and lexical uncertainty on processing long-distance dependencies in reading
JF  - PeerJ
N2  - To make sense of a sentence, a reader must keep track of dependent relationships between words, such as between a verb and its particle (e.g. turn the music down). In languages such as German, verb-particle dependencies often span long distances, with the particle only appearing at the end of the clause. This means that it may be necessary to process a large amount of intervening sentence material before the full verb of the sentence is known. To facilitate processing, previous studies have shown that readers can preactivate the lexical information of neighbouring upcoming words, but less is known about whether such preactivation can be sustained over longer distances. We asked the question, do readers preactivate lexical information about long-distance verb particles? In one self-paced reading and one eye tracking experiment, we delayed the appearance of an obligatory verb particle that varied only in the predictability of its lexical identity. We additionally manipulated the length of the delay in order to test two contrasting accounts of dependency processing: that increased distance between dependent elements may sharpen expectation of the distant word and facilitate its processing (an antilocality effect), or that it may slow processing via temporal activation decay (a locality effect). We isolated decay by delaying the particle with a neutral noun modifier containing no information about the identity of the upcoming particle, and no known sources of interference or working memory load. Under the assumption that readers would preactivate the lexical representations of plausible verb particles, we hypothesised that a smaller number of plausible particles would lead to stronger preactivation of each particle, and thus higher predictability of the target. This in turn should have made predictable target particles more resistant to the effects of decay than less predictable target particles. The eye tracking experiment provided evidence that higher predictability did facilitate reading times, but found evidence against any effect of decay or its interaction with predictability. The self-paced reading study provided evidence against any effect of predictability or temporal decay, or their interaction. In sum, we provide evidence from eye movements that readers preactivate long-distance lexical content and that adding neutral sentence information does not induce detectable decay of this activation. The findings are consistent with accounts suggesting that delaying dependency resolution may only affect processing if the intervening information either confirms expectations or adds to working memory load, and that temporal activation decay alone may not be a major predictor of processing time.
KW  - reading
KW  - comprehension
KW  - temporal decay
KW  - preactivation
KW  - long distance
KW  - dependencies
KW  - entropy
KW  - psycholinguistics
KW  - locality
KW  - antilocality
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10438
SN  - 2167-8359
VL  - 8
PB  - PeerJ Inc.
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Krasotkina, Anna
A1  - Götz, Antonia
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Schwarzer, Gudrun
T1  - Infants’ gaze patterns for same-race and other-race faces, and the other-race effect
JF  - Brain Sciences
N2  - The other-race effect (ORE) can be described as difficulties in discriminating between faces of ethnicities other than one's own, and can already be observed at approximately 9 months of age. Recent studies also showed that infants visually explore same-and other-race faces differently. However, it is still unclear whether infants' looking behavior for same- and other-race faces is related to their face discrimination abilities. To investigate this question we conducted a habituation-dishabituation experiment to examine Caucasian 9-month-old infants' gaze behavior, and their discrimination of same- and other-race faces, using eye-tracking measurements. We found that infants looked longer at the eyes of same-race faces over the course of habituation, as compared to other-race faces. After habituation, infants demonstrated a clear other-race effect by successfully discriminating between same-race faces, but not other-race faces. Importantly, the infants' ability to discriminate between same-race faces significantly correlated with their fixation time towards the eyes of same-race faces during habituation. Thus, our findings suggest that for infants old enough to begin exhibiting the ORE, gaze behavior during habituation is related to their ability to differentiate among same-race faces, compared to other-race faces.
KW  - eye-tracking
KW  - infancy
KW  - habituation
KW  - other-race effect
KW  - face
KW  - discrimination
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10060331
SN  - 2076-3425
VL  - 10
IS  - 6
PB  - Brain Sciences
CY  - Basel
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Genzel, Susanne
A1  - Kügler, Frank
T1  - Production and perception of question prosody in Akan
JF  - Journal of the International Phonetic Association
N2  - The paper presents a production experiment investigating the phonetic parameters speakers employ to differentiate Yes-No questions from string-identical statements in Akan, a West-African two-tone Kwa language. Results show that, in comparison to the statement, speakers use a higher pitch register throughout the utterance as a global parameter, and falling f0, longer duration and higher intensity as local parameters on the final syllable of the Yes-No question. Further, two perception experiments (forced-choice identification and gating) investigate the perceptual relevance of the global parameter and the local final parameters. Results show that listeners cannot assess the higher pitch register information to identify the mode of a sentence early on. Rather, identification takes place when the local phonetic parameters on the final vowel are available. The findings point to the superiority of language-specific cues in sentence mode perception. It is suggested that Akan uses a low boundary tone that associates with the right edge of the intonation phrase (L%) in Yes-No questions. The results are discussed from the point of view of question intonation typology in African languages. It is argued that a classification along the lines of functionally relevant cues is preferable to an impressionistic analysis.
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100318000191
SN  - 0025-1003
SN  - 1475-3502
VL  - 50
IS  - 1
SP  - 61
EP  - 92
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Amaechi, Mary Chimaobi
A1  - Georgi, Doreen
T1  - On optional wh-/focus fronting in Igbo
BT  - a SYN-SEM-PHON interaction
JF  - Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft
N2  - This paper discusses surface optionality in focus fronting in the Benue-Congo language Igbo. A focused XP can occur in-situ or ex-situ. We argue that the optionality does not have its origins in the syntax: in fact, exactly one focused XP has to move to the designated focus position in the left periphery in the syntax. The alternation between in-situ and ex-situ rather arises at PF: either the lowest or the topmost copy of the focus chain is pronounced. The choice is determined by semantic-pragmatic factors, i. e., we see an interaction between PF and LF. This constitutes a challenge for a strict version of the Y-model of grammar.
KW  - (A)over-bar-movement
KW  - focus realization
KW  - PF-optionality
KW  - Y-model
KW  - copy
KW  - pronounciation
KW  - Benue-Congo languages
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/zfs-2020-2017
SN  - 0721-9067
SN  - 1613-3706
VL  - 39
IS  - 3
SP  - 299
EP  - 327
PB  - De Gruyter
CY  - Berlin
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gafos, Adamantios I.
A1  - Lieshout, Pascal H. H. M. van
T1  - Models and theories of speech production
BT  - editorial
JF  - Frontiers in psychology
KW  - speech production
KW  - motor control
KW  - dynamical models
KW  - phonology
KW  - speech
KW  - disorders
KW  - timing
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01238
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 11
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Fuhrmeister, Pamela
A1  - Smith, Garrett
A1  - Myers, Emily B.
T1  - Overlearning of non-native speech sounds does not result in superior consolidation after a period of sleep
JF  - The journal of the Acoustical Society of America
N2  - Recent studies suggest that sleep-mediated consolidation processes help adults learn non-native speech sounds. However, overnight improvement was not seen when participants learned in the morning, perhaps resulting from native-language interference. The current study trained participants to perceive the Hindi dental/retroflex contrast in the morning and tested whether increased training can lead to overnight improvement. Results showed overnight effects regardless of training amount. In contrast to previous studies, participants in this study heard sounds in limited contexts (i.e., one talker and one vowel context), corroborating other findings, suggesting that overnight improvement is seen in non-native phonetic learning when variability is limited.
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0000943
SN  - 0001-4966
SN  - 1520-8524
VL  - 147
IS  - 3
SP  - EL289
EP  - EL294
PB  - American Institute of Physics
CY  - Melville
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Puebla, Cecilia
A1  - Garcia, Juan
T1  - Advocating the inclusion of older adults in digital language learning technology and research
BT  - some considerations
JF  - Bilingualism : language and cognition
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921000742
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 25
IS  - 3
SP  - 398
EP  - 399
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ghaffarvand Mokari, Payam
A1  - Sardhaei, Nasim Mahdinezhad
T1  - Predictive power of cepstral coefficients and spectral moments in the classification of Azerbaijani fricatives
JF  - The journal of the Acoustical Society of America
N2  - This study compares the classification of Azerbaijani fricatives based on two sets of features: (a) spectral moments, spectral peak, amplitude, duration, and (b) cepstral coefficients employing Hidden Markov Models to divide each fricative into three regions such that the variances of the measures within each region are minimized. The cepstral coefficients were found to be more reliable predictors in the classification of all nine Azerbaijani fricatives and the cepstral measures yielded highly successful classification rates (91.21% across both genders) in the identification of the full set of fricatives of Azerbaijani.
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0000830
SN  - 0001-4966
SN  - 1520-8524
VL  - 147
IS  - 3
SP  - EL228
EP  - EL234
PB  - American Institute of Physics
CY  - Melville
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Krasotkina, Anna
A1  - Götz, Antonia
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Schwarzer, Gudrun
T1  - Perceptual narrowing in face- and speech-perception domains in infancy
BT  - a longitudinal approach
JF  - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal
N2  - During the first year of life, infants undergo a process known as perceptual narrowing, which reduces their sensitivity to classes of stimuli which the infants do not encounter in their environment. It has been proposed that perceptual narrowing for faces and speech may be driven by shared domain-general processes. To investigate this theory, our study longitudinally tested 50 German Caucasian infants with respect to these domains first at 6 months of age followed by a second testing at 9 months of age. We used an infant-controlled habituation-dishabituation paradigm to test the infants' ability to discriminate among other-race Asian faces and non-native Cantonese speech tones, as well as same-race Caucasian faces as a control. We found that while at 6 months of age infants could discriminate among all stimuli, by 9 months of age they could no longer discriminate among other-race faces or non-native tones. However, infants could discriminate among same-race stimuli both at 6 and at 9 months of age. These results demonstrate that the same infants undergo perceptual narrowing for both other-race faces and non-native speech tones between the ages of 6 and 9 months. This parallel development of perceptual narrowing occurring in both the face and speech perception modalities over the same period of time lends support to the domain-general theory of perceptual narrowing in face and speech perception.
KW  - face perception
KW  - speech perception
KW  - longitudinal
KW  - infant
KW  - perceptual
KW  - narrowing
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101607
SN  - 0163-6383
SN  - 1879-0453
VL  - 64
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tran, Thuan
T1  - Non-canonical word order and temporal reference in Vietnamese
JF  - Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences
N2  - The paper revisits Duffield's (2007) (Duffield, Nigel. 2007. Aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure: Separating tense from assertion. Linguistics 45(4). 765-814) analysis of the correlation between the position of a 'when'-phrase and the temporal reference of a bare sentence in Vietnamese. Bare sentences in Vietnamese, based on (Smith, Carlota S. & Mary S. Erbaugh. 2005. Temporal interpretation in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics 43(4). 713-756), are argued to obtain their temporal interpretation from their aspectual composition, and the default temporal reference: bounded events are located in the past, unbounded events at present. It is shown that the correlation so observed in when-questions is superficial, and is tied to the syntax and semantics of temporal modification and the requirement that temporal adverbials denoting future time is base generated in sentence-initial position, and past time adverbials in sentence-final position. A 'when'-phrase, being temporally underspecified, obtains its temporal value from its base position. However, the correlation between word order and temporal reference in argument wh-questions and declaratives is factual, depending on whether the predicate-argument configuration allows for a telic interpretation or not. To be specific, it is dependent on whether the application of Generic Modification (Snyder, William. 2012. Parameter theory and motion predicates. In Violeta Demonte & Louise McNally (eds.), Telicity, change, and state. Acrosscategorial view of event structure, 279-299. Oxford: Oxford University Press) or accomplishment composition is realized. Canonical declaratives, and argument wh-questions, with telicity inducing material, license GM or accomplishment composition, yielding bounded events, hence past; by contrast, their noncanonical counterparts block GM or accomplishment composition, giving rise to unbounded event descriptions, hence non-past.
KW  - Vietnamese
KW  - accomplishment composition
KW  - temporal reference
KW  - generic
KW  - modification
KW  - temporal modification
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0256
SN  - 0024-3949
SN  - 1613-396X
VL  - 59
IS  - 1
SP  - 1
EP  - 34
PB  - De Gruyter Mouton
CY  - Berlin
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ciaccio, Laura Anna
A1  - Kgolo, Naledi
A1  - Clahsen, Harald
T1  - Morphological decomposition in Bantu
BT  - a masked priming study on Setswana prefixation
JF  - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2  - African languages have rarely been the subject of psycholinguistic experimentation. The current study employs a masked visual priming experiment to investigate morphological processing in a Bantu language, Setswana. Our study takes advantage of the rich system of prefixes in Bantu languages, which offers the opportunity of testing morphological priming effects from prefixed inflected words and directly comparing them to priming effects from prefixed derived words on the same targets. We found significant priming effects of similar magnitude for both prefixed inflected and derived word forms, which were clearly dissociable from prime-target relatedness in both meaning and (orthographic) form. These findings provide support for a (possibly universal) mechanism of morphological decomposition applied during early visual word recognition that segments both (prefixed) inflected and derived word forms into their morphological constituents.
KW  - prefixes
KW  - inflection
KW  - affix stripping
KW  - visual word recognition
KW  - African
KW  - languages
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2020.1722847
SN  - 2327-3798
SN  - 2327-3801
VL  - 35
IS  - 10
SP  - 1257
EP  - 1271
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schäfer, Robin
A1  - Stede, Manfred
T1  - Argument mining on twitter
BT  - a survey
JF  - Information technology : it ; Methoden und innovative Anwendungen der Informatik und Informationstechnik ; Organ der Fachbereiche 3 und 4 der GI e.V. und des Fachbereichs 6 der ITG
N2  - In the last decade, the field of argument mining has grown notably. However, only relatively few studies have investigated argumentation in social media and specifically on Twitter. Here, we provide the, to our knowledge, first critical in-depth survey of the state of the art in tweet-based argument mining. We discuss approaches to modelling the structure of arguments in the context of tweet corpus annotation, and we review current progress in the task of detecting argument components and their relations in tweets. We also survey the intersection of argument mining and stance detection, before we conclude with an outlook.
KW  - Argument Mining
KW  - Twitter
KW  - Stance Detection
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/itit-2020-0053
SN  - 1611-2776
SN  - 2196-7032
VL  - 63
IS  - 1
SP  - 45
EP  - 58
PB  - De Gruyter
CY  - Berlin
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Czapka, Sophia
A1  - Wotschack, Christiane
A1  - Klassert, Annegret
A1  - Festman, Julia
T1  - A path to the bilingual advantage
BT  - pairwise matching of individuals
JF  - Bilingualism : language and cognition
N2  - 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.
KW  - executive functions
KW  - bilingualism
KW  - interference inhibition
KW  - pairwise
KW  - matching
KW  - primary school children
KW  - background variables
KW  - lexicon size
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000166
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 23
IS  - 2
SP  - 344
EP  - 354
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bade, Nadine
T1  - On the scope and nature of Maximise Presupposition
JF  - Language and linguistics compass
N2  - The paper introduces the principle Maximise Presupposition and its cognates. The main focus of the literature and this article is on the inferences that arise as a result of reasoning with Maximise Presupposition ('anti-presuppositions'). I will review the arguments put forward for distinguishing them from other inference types, most notably presuppositions and conversational implicatures. I will zoom in on three main issues regarding Maximise Presupposition and these inferences critically discussed in the literature: epistemic strength(ening), projection, and the role of alternatives. I will discuss more recent views which argue for either a uniform treatment of anti-presuppositions and implicatures and/or a revision of the original principle in light of new data and developments in pragmatics.
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12416
SN  - 1749-818X
VL  - 15
IS  - 6
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hein, Johannes
T1  - Verb movement and the lack of verb-doubling VP topicalization in Germanic
JF  - The journal of comparative Germanic linguistics
N2  - In the absence of a stranded auxiliary or modal, VP-topicalization in most Germanic languages gives rise to the presence of a dummy verb meaning 'do'. Cross-linguistically, this is a rather uncommon strategy as comparable VP-fronting constructions in other languages, e.g. Hebrew, Polish, and Portuguese, among many others, exhibit verb doubling. A comparison of several recent approaches to verb doubling in VP-fronting reveals that it is the consequence of VP-evacuating head movement of the verb to some higher functional head, which saves the (low copy of the) verb from undergoing copy deletion as part of the low VP copy in the VP-topicalization dependency. Given that almost all Germanic languages have such V-salvaging head movement, namely V-to-C movement, but do not show verb doubling, this paper suggests that V-raising is exceptionally impossible in VP-topicalization clauses and addresses the question of why it is blocked. After discussing and rejecting some conceivable explanations for the lack of verb doubling, I propose that the blocking effect arises from a bleeding interaction between V-to-C movement and VP-to-SpecCP movement. As both operations are triggered by the same head, i.e. C, the VP is always encountered first by a downward search algorithm. Movement of VP then freezes it and its lower copies for subextraction precluding subsequent V-raising. Crucially, this implies that there is no V-to-T raising in most Germanic languages. V2 languages with V-to-T raising, e.g. Yiddish, are correctly predicted to not exhibit the blocking effect.
KW  - Verb doubling
KW  - Head movement
KW  - VP-topicalization
KW  - Copy deletion
KW  - V-to-T
KW  - movement
KW  - V-to-C movement
KW  - Verb second
KW  - Freezing
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-021-09125-5
SN  - 1383-4924
SN  - 1572-8552
VL  - 24
IS  - 1
SP  - 89
EP  - 144
PB  - Springer Science + Business Media B.V.
CY  - Dordrecht
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Do processing resource limitations shape heritage language grammars?
JF  - Bilingualism : language and cognition
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000397
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 23
IS  - 1
SP  - 23
EP  - 24
PB  - Cambridge University Press
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Clahsen, Harald
A1  - Jessen, Anna
T1  - Morphological generalization in bilingual language production
BT  - age of acquisition determines variability
JF  - Language acquisition : a journal of developmental linguistics
N2  - Morphological variability in bilingual language production is widely attested. Producing inflected words has been found to be less reliable and consistent in bilinguals than in first-language (functionally monolingual) L1 speakers, even for bilingual speakers at advanced proficiency levels. The sources for these differences are not well understood. The current study presents a detailed investigation of morphological generalization processes in bilingual speakers' language production. We examined past participle formation of German using an elicited-production experiment containing nonce verbs with varying degrees of similarity to existing verbs testing a large group of bilingual Turkish/German speakers relative to L1 German speakers. We compared similarity-based lexical extensions with generalizations of morphological rules. The results show that rule-based generalizations are used less often and more variably within the bilingual group than within the L1 group. Our results also show a selective effect of age of acquisition on the bilingual speakers' morphological generalizations.
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2021.1910267
SN  - 1048-9223
SN  - 1532-7817
VL  - 28
IS  - 4
SP  - 370
EP  - 386
PB  - Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schroeder, Christoph
T1  - The advanced acquisition of orthography in heritage Turkish in Germany
JF  - Written language & literacy
N2  - The paper investigates Turkish texts from heritage speakers of Turkish in Germany in a pseudo-longitudinal setting, looking at pupils' texts from the 5th, 7th, 10th and 12th grades. Two types of dynamics are identified in the advanced acquisition(1) of Turkish orthography in the heritage context. One is the dynamic of language contact, where in certain areas of the orthography, we find a re-interpretation of Turkish principles according to the German model. However, this changes as the pupils grow up. The second dynamic is the heritage situation. The heritage situation on one side leads to the establishment of new practices, and it also leads to a higher degree of variability of spelling solutions in those areas, where the orthographic system of Turkish poses challenges to every writer, whether monolingual and growing up in Turkey or heritage speaker.
KW  - Turkish
KW  - heritage language
KW  - orthography
KW  - orthographic word
KW  - advanced acquisition of
KW  - language contact Turkish-German
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.00043.sch
SN  - 1387-6732
SN  - 1570-6001
VL  - 23
IS  - 2
SP  - 251
EP  - 271
PB  - John Benjamins Publishing Co.
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - De Veaugh-Geiss, Joseph P.
T1  - nà-cleft (non-)exhaustivity
BT  - variability in Akan
JF  - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics
N2  - This paper presents two experimental studies on the exhaustive inference associated with focus-background na-clefts in Akan (among others, Boadi 1974; Duah 2015; Grubic & Renans & Duah 2019; Titov 2019), with a direct comparison to two recent experiments on German es-clefts employing an identical design (De Veaugh-Geiss et al. 2018). Despite the unforeseen response patterns in Akan in the incremental information-retrieval paradigm used, a post-hoc exploratory analysis reveals compelling parallels between the two languages. The results are compatible with a unified approach both (i) cross-linguistically between Akan and German; and (ii) cross-sententially between na-clefts (a na P, 'It is a who did P') and definite pseudoclefts, i.e., definite descriptions with identity statements (Nipa no a P ne a, 'The person who did P is a') (Boadi 1974; Ofori 2011). Participant variability in (non-)exhaustive interpretations is compatible with discourse pragmatic approaches to cleft exhaustivity (Pollard & Yasavul 2016; De Veaugh-Geiss et al. 2018; Titov 2019).
KW  - Akan
KW  - nà-clefts
KW  - definite pseudoclefts
KW  - exhaustivity
KW  - experimental studies
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5698
SN  - 2397-1835
VL  - 6
IS  - 1
PB  - Open Library of Humanities
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Stede, Manfred
T1  - From connectives to coherence relations
BT  - a case study of German contrastrive connectives
JF  - Revue roumaine de linguistique : RRL = Romanian review of linguistics
N2  - The notion of coherence relations is quite widely accepted in general, but concrete proposals differ considerably on the questions of how they should be motivated, which relations are to be assumed, and how they should be defined. This paper takes a "bottom-up" perspective by assessing the contribution made by linguistic signals (connectives), using insights from the relevant literature as well as verification by practical text annotation. We work primarily with the German language here and focus on the realm of contrast. Thus, we suggest a new inventory of contrastive connective functions and discuss their relationship to contrastive coherence relations that have been proposed in earlier work.
KW  - coherence relation
KW  - connective
KW  - contrast
KW  - concession
KW  - corpus analysis
Y1  - 2020
SN  - 0035-3957
VL  - 65
IS  - 3
SP  - 213
EP  - 233
PB  - Ed. Academiei Române
CY  - Bucureşti
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Frank, Ulrike
A1  - Radtke, Julia
A1  - Nienstedt, Julie Cläre
A1  - Pötter-Nerger, Monika
A1  - Schönwald, Beate
A1  - Buhmann, Carsten
A1  - Gerloff, Christian
A1  - Niessen, Almut
A1  - Flügel, Till
A1  - Koseki, Jana-Christiane
A1  - Pflug, Christina
T1  - Dysphagia screening in Parkinson's Disease
BT  - a diagnostic accuracy cross-sectional study investigating the applicability of the Gugging Swallowing Screen (GUSS)
JF  - Neurogastroenterology and motility
N2  - Background
Simple water-swallowing screening tools are not predictive of aspiration and dysphagia in patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD). We investigated the diagnostic accuracy of a multi-texture screening tool, the Gugging Swallowing Screen (GUSS) to identify aspiration and dysphagia/penetration in PD patients compared to flexible endoscopic evaluation of swallowing (FEES). 

Methods
Swallowing function was evaluated in 51 PD participants in clinical 'on-medication' state with the GUSS and a FEES examination according to standardized protocols. Inter-rater reliability and convergent validity were determined and GUSS- and FEES-based diet recommendations were compared. 

Key Results
Inter-rater reliability of GUSS ratings was high (r(s) = 0.8; p < 0.001). Aspiration was identified by the GUSS with a sensitivity of 50%, and specificity of 51.35% (PPV 28%, NPV 73%, LR+ 1.03, LR- 0.97), dysphagia/penetration was identified with 72.97% sensitivity and 35.71% specificity (PPV 75%, NPV 33.33%, LR+ 1.14, LR- 0.76). Agreement between GUSS- and FEES-based diet recommendations was low (r(s) = 0.12, p = 0.42) with consistent NPO (Nil per Os) allocation by GUSS and FEES in only one participant. 

Conclusions and Inferences
The multi-texture screening tool GUSS in its current form, although applicable with good inter-rater reliability, does not detect aspiration in PD patients with acceptable accuracy. Modifications of the GUSS parameters "coughing," "voice change" and "delayed swallowing" might enhance validity. The GUSS' diet recommendations overestimate the need for oral intake restriction in PD patients and should be verified by instrumental swallowing examination.
KW  - aspiration
KW  - dysphagia
KW  - FEES
KW  - Gugging Swallowing Screen
KW  - Parkinson' s disease
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/nmo.14034
SN  - 1350-1925
SN  - 1365-2982
VL  - 33
IS  - 5
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - Using approximate Bayesian computation for estimating parameters in the cue-based retrieval model of sentence processing
JF  - MethodsX
N2  - A commonly used approach to parameter estimation in computational models is the so-called grid search procedure: the entire parameter space is searched in small steps to determine the parameter value that provides the best fit to the observed data. This approach has several disadvantages: first, it can be computationally very expensive; second, one optimal point value of the parameter is reported as the best fit value; we cannot quantify our uncertainty about the parameter estimate. In the main journal article that this methods article accompanies (Jager et al., 2020, Interference patterns in subject-verb agreement and reflexives revisited: A large-sample study, Journal of Memory and Language), we carried out parameter estimation using Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), which is a Bayesian approach that allows us to quantify our uncertainty about the parameter's values given data. This customization has the further advantage that it allows us to generate both prior and posterior predictive distributions of reading times from the cue-based retrieval model of Lewis and Vasishth, 2005. <br /> Instead of the conventional method of using grid search, we use Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) for parameter estimation in the [4] model. <br /> The ABC method of parameter estimation has the advantage that the uncertainty of the parameter can be quantified.
KW  - Bayesian parameter estimation
KW  - Prior and posterior predictive
KW  - distributions
KW  - Psycholinguistics
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2020.100850
SN  - 2215-0161
VL  - 7
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Huttenlauch, Clara
A1  - Beer, Carola de
A1  - Hanne-Kloth, Sandra
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
T1  - Production of prosodic cues in coordinate name sequences addressing varying interlocutors
JF  - Laboratory phonology
N2  - Prosodic boundaries can be used to disambiguate the syntactic structure of coordinated name sequences (coordinates). To answer the question whether disambiguating prosody is produced in a situationally dependent or independent manner and to contribute to our understanding of the nature of the prosody-syntax link, we systematically explored variability in the prosody of boundary productions of coordinates evoked by different contextual settings in a referential communication task. Our analysis focused on prosodic boundaries produced to distinguish sequences with different syntactic structures (i.e., with or without internal grouping of the constituents). In German, these prosodic boundaries are indicated by three major prosodic cues: f0-range, final lengthening, and pause. In line with the Proximity/Anti-Proximity principle of the syntax-prosody model by Kentner and Fery (2013), speakers clearly use all three cues for constituent grouping and prosodically mark groups within and at their right boundary, indicating that prosodic phrasing is not a local phenomenon. Intra-individually, we found a rather stable prosodic pattern across contexts. However, inter-individually speakers differed from each other with respect to the prosodic cue combinations that they (consistently) used to mark the boundaries. Overall, our data speak in favour of a close link between syntax and prosody and for situational independence of disambiguating prosody.
KW  - Prosodic boundaries
KW  - prosodic cues
KW  - coordinates
KW  - varying interlocutors
KW  - variability
KW  - f0
KW  - duration
KW  - pre-final lengthening
KW  - pause
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.221
SN  - 1868-6346
SN  - 1868-6354
VL  - 12
IS  - 1
PB  - Ubiquity Press
CY  - London
ER  -