TY  - JOUR
A1  - Verhoeven, Elisabeth
A1  - Kügler, Frank
T1  - Accentual preferences and predictability: An acceptability study on split intransitivity in German
JF  - Lingua : international review of general linguistics
N2  - The difference in the default prosodic realization of simple sentences with unergative vs. unaccusative/passive verbs (assigning early nuclear accent with unaccusative/passive verbs but late nuclear accent with unergative verbs) is often related to the syntactic distinction of their nominative arguments as starting off in different hierarchical positions. Alternative accounts try to trace this prosodic variation back to asymmetries in the semantic or pragmatic contribution of the verb to an utterance. The present article investigates the interaction of the assignment of default nuclear accent with the predictability of the verb. In an experimental study testing the acceptability of nuclear accent assignment, we confirmed that the predictability of the verb influences accentual preferences (such that highly predictable verbs are preferably not accented). However, the experiment also reveals that the unaccusativity distinction cannot be accounted for by means of pragmatic phenomena of this type: the two verb classes are associated with distinct accentual patterns in the baseline condition, that is, without the predictability manipulation. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
KW  - Nuclear accent
KW  - Prosodic phrasing
KW  - Unaccusativity
KW  - Unergative verbs
KW  - Predictability
KW  - Information structure
Y1  - 2015
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.09.013
SN  - 0024-3841
SN  - 1872-6135
VL  - 165
SP  - 298
EP  - 315
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Dambacher, Michael
A1  - Dimigen, Olaf
A1  - Braun, Mario
A1  - Wille, Kristin
A1  - Jacobs, Arthur M.
A1  - Kliegl, Reinhold
T1  - Stimulus onset asynchrony and the timeline of word recognition: Event-related potentials during sentence reading
JF  - Neuropsychologia : an international journal in behavioural and cognitive neuroscience
N2  - Three ERP experiments examined the effect of word presentation rate (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA) on the time course of word frequency and predictability effects in sentence reading. In Experiments 1 and 2, sentences were presented word-by-word in the screen center at an SOA of 700 and 490 ms, respectively. While these rates are typical for psycholinguistic ERP research, natural reading happens at a considerably faster pace. Accordingly. Experiment 3 employed a near-normal SOA of 280 ms, which approximated the rate of normal reading. Main results can be summarized as follows: (1) The onset latency of early frequency effects decreases gradually with increasing presentation rates. (2) An early interaction between top-down and bottom-up processing is observed only under a near-normal SOA. (3) N400 predictability effects occur later and are smaller at a near-normal (i.e., high) presentation rate than at the lower rates commonly used in ERP experiments. (4) ERP morphology is different at the shortest compared to longer SOAs. Together, the results point to a special role of a near-normal presentation rate for visual word recognition and therefore suggest that SOA should be taken into account in research of natural reading.
KW  - Word recognition
KW  - Sentence reading
KW  - Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA)
KW  - Frequency
KW  - Predictability
KW  - Event-related potentials (ERPs)
Y1  - 2012
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.04.011
SN  - 0028-3932
VL  - 50
IS  - 8
SP  - 1852
EP  - 1870
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  -