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 - 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 - Patterson, Clare A1 - Trompelt, Helena A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - The online application of binding condition B in native and non-native pronoun resolution JF - Frontiers in psychology KW - pronoun resolution KW - binding KW - sentence processing KW - eye-movement monitoring KW - bilingualism KW - English Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00147 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 5 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pan, Hui-Yu A1 - Schimke, Sarah A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Referential context effects in non-native relative clause ambiguity resolution JF - International journal of bilingualism : cross-disciplinary, cross-linguistic studies of language behavior N2 - We report the results from two experiments investigating how referential context information affects native and non-native readers' interpretation of ambiguous relative clauses in sentences such as The journalist interviewed the assistant of the inspector who was looking very serious. The preceding discourse context was manipulated such that it provided two potential referents for either the first (the assistant) or the second (the inspector) of the two noun phrases that could potentially host the relative clause, thus biasing towards either an NP1 or an NP2 modification reading. The results from an offline comprehension task indicate that both native English speakers' and German and Chinese-speaking ESL learners' ultimate interpretation preferences were reliably influenced by the type of referential context. In contrast, in a corresponding self-paced-reading task we found that referential context information modulated only the non-native participants' disambiguation preferences but not the native speakers'. Our results corroborate and extend previous findings suggesting that non-native comprehenders' initial analysis of structurally ambiguous input is strongly influenced by biasing discourse information. KW - Second language KW - sentence processing KW - ambiguity resolution KW - referential context KW - relative clause KW - self-paced reading Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006913515769 SN - 1367-0069 SN - 1756-6878 VL - 19 IS - 3 SP - 298 EP - 313 PB - Sage Publ. CY - London ER - TY - GEN A1 - Pan, Hui-Yu A1 - Schimke, Sarah A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Referential context effects in non-native relative clause ambiguity resolution T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - We report the results from two experiments investigating how referential context information affects native and non-native readers’ interpretation of ambiguous relative clauses in sentences such as The journalist interviewed the assistant of the inspector who was looking very serious. The preceding discourse context was manipulated such that it provided two potential referents for either the first (the assistant) or the second (the inspector) of the two noun phrases that could potentially host the relative clause, thus biasing towards either an NP1 or an NP2 modification reading. The results from an offline comprehension task indicate that both native English speakers’ and German and Chinese-speaking ESL learners’ ultimate interpretation preferences were reliably influenced by the type of referential context. In contrast, in a corresponding self-paced-reading task we found that referential context information modulated only the non-native participants’ disambiguation preferences but not the native speakers’. Our results corroborate and extend previous findings suggesting that non-native comprehenders’ initial analysis of structurally ambiguous input is strongly influenced by biasing discourse information. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 398 KW - second language KW - sentence processing KW - ambiguity resolution KW - referential context KW - relative clause KW - self-paced reading Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-404785 IS - 398 ER -