TY  - GEN
A1  - Burmester, Juliane
A1  - Sauermann, Antje
A1  - Spalek, Katharina
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
T1  - Sensitivity to salience
BT  - linguistic vs. visual cues affect sentence processing and pronoun resolution
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - Sentence comprehension is optimised by indicating entities as salient through linguistic (i.e., information-structural) or visual means. We compare how salience of a depicted referent due to a linguistic (i.e., topic status) or visual cue (i.e., a virtual person’s gaze shift) modulates sentence comprehension in German. We investigated processing of sentences with varying word order and pronoun resolution by means of self-paced reading and an antecedent choice task, respectively. Our results show that linguistic as well as visual salience cues immediately speeded up reading times of sentences mentioning the salient referent first. In contrast, for pronoun resolution, linguistic and visual cues modulated antecedent choice preferences less congruently. In sum, our findings speak in favour of a significant impact of linguistic and visual salience cues on sentence comprehension, substantiating that salient information delivered via language as well as the visual environment is integrated in the current mental representation of the discourse.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 454 
KW  - topic status
KW  - eye gaze
KW  - visual context
KW  - reading times
KW  - antecedent choice
Y1  - 2018
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-412838
IS  - 454
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Sekerina, Irina A.
A1  - Sauermann, Antje
T1  - Visual attention and quantifier-spreading in heritage Russian bilinguals
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier every and make quantifier-spreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking study tested bilingual heritage Russian–English adults and investigated how they interpret of sentences like Every alligator lies in a bathtub in both languages. Participants performed a sentence–picture verification task while their eye movements were recorded. Pictures showed three pairs of alligators in bathtubs and two extra objects: elephants (Control condition), bathtubs (Overexhaustive condition), or alligators (Underexhaustive condition). Monolingual adults performed at ceiling in all conditions. Heritage language (HL) adults made 20% q-spreading errors, but only in the Overexhaustive condition, and when they made an error they spent more time looking at the two extra bathtubs during the Verb region. We attribute q-spreading in HL speakers to cognitive overload caused by the necessity to integrate conflicting sources of information, i.e. the spoken sentences in their weaker, heritage, language and attention-demanding visual context, that differed with respect to referential salience.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 404 
KW  - eye-tracking
KW  - heritage language
KW  - quantifier-spreading
KW  - Russian
KW  - universal quantifiers
KW  - visual  attention
Y1  - 2018
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-404870
IS  - 404
ER  -