TY - JOUR A1 - van de Koot, Hans A1 - Silva, Renita A1 - Felser, Claudia A1 - Sato, Mikako T1 - Does Dutch a-scrambling involve movement? Evidence from antecedent priming JF - The linguistic review N2 - The present study focuses on A-scrambling in Dutch, a local word-order alternation that typically signals the discourse-anaphoric status of the scrambled constituent. We use cross-modal priming to investigate whether an A-scrambled direct object gives rise to antecedent reactivation effects in the position where a movement theory would postulate a trace. Our results indicate that this is not the case, thereby providing support for a base-generation analysis of A-scrambling in Dutch. KW - scrambling KW - movement KW - cross-modal priming Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2015-0010 SN - 0167-6318 SN - 1613-3676 VL - 32 IS - 4 SP - 739 EP - 776 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin 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 - Reifegerste, Jana A1 - Hauer, Franziska A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Agreement processing and attraction errors in aging BT - evidence from subject-verb agreement in German JF - Aging, neuropsychology, and cognition : a journal on normal and dysfunctional development N2 - Effects of aging on lexical processing are well attested, but the picture is less clear for grammatical processing. Where age differences emerge, these are usually ascribed to working-memory (WM) decline. Previous studies on the influence of WM on agreement computation have yielded inconclusive results, and work on aging and subject-verb agreement processing is lacking. In two experiments (Experiment 1: timed grammaticality judgment, Experiment 2: self-paced reading + WM test), we investigated older (OA) and younger (YA) adults’ susceptibility to agreement attraction errors. We found longer reading latencies and judgment reaction times (RTs) for OAs. Further, OAs, particularly those with low WM scores, were more accepting of sentences with attraction errors than YAs. OAs showed longer reading latencies for ungrammatical sentences, again modulated by WM, than YAs. Our results indicate that OAs have greater difficulty blocking intervening nouns from interfering with the computation of agreement dependencies. WM can modulate this effect. KW - Subject-verb agreement KW - attraction errors KW - aging KW - grammaticality judgment KW - self-paced reading Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13825585.2016.1251550 SN - 1382-5585 SN - 1744-4128 VL - 24 IS - 6 SP - 672 EP - 702 PB - Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Reifegerste, Jana A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Effects of Aging on Interference During Pronoun Resolution JF - Journal of speech, language, and hearing research N2 - Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of healthy aging on the ability to suppress grammatically illicit antecedents during pronoun resolution. Method: In 2 reading-based acceptability-judgment experiments, younger and older speakers of German read sentences containing an object pronoun and 2 potential antecedent noun phrases, only 1 of which was a grammatically licit antecedent. Using a gender-mismatch paradigm, we compared to what extent younger and older speakers were sensitive to feature (mis)matches between the pronoun and either of the 2 antecedents. All participants were fluent readers of German and had finished at least secondary education. Results: Experiment 1 used a self-paced reading paradigm. Older speakers showed greater sensitivity than younger ones to mismatching licit antecedents, but no group showed any evidence of interference from an intervening competitor antecedent. In Experiment 2, we increased the processing demand by using paced word-by-word stimulus presentation and longer sentences. Here, older participants showed reduced sensitivity, in comparison with younger people, to mismatching licit antecedents. Unlike our younger participants, they showed signs of distraction by the presence of a linearly closer but grammatically inappropriate antecedent when no appropriate antecedent was available. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1044/2017_JSLHR-L-17-0183 SN - 1092-4388 SN - 1558-9102 VL - 60 SP - 3573 EP - 3589 PB - American Speech-Language-Hearing Assoc. CY - Rockville ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Radford, Andrew A1 - Felser, Claudia A1 - Boxell, Oliver T1 - Preposition copying and pruning in present-day English JF - English language and linguistics N2 - This article investigates the nature of preposition copying and preposition pruning structures in present-day English. We begin by illustrating the two phenomena and consider how they might be accounted for in syntactic terms, and go on to explore the possibility that preposition copying and pruning arise for processing reasons. We then report on two acceptability judgement experiments examining the extent to which native speakers of English are sensitive to these types of 'error' in language comprehension. Our results indicate that preposition copying creates redundancy rather than ungrammaticality, whereas preposition pruning creates processing problems for comprehenders that may render it unacceptable in timed (but not necessarily in untimed) judgement tasks. Our findings furthermore illustrate the usefulness of combining corpus studies and experimentally elicited data for gaining a clearer picture of usage and acceptability, and the potential benefits of examining syntactic phenomena from both a theoretical and a processing perspective. Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674312000172 SN - 1360-6743 VL - 16 IS - 2 SP - 403 EP - 426 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge 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 - 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 - Patterson, Clare A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Delayed Application of Binding Condition C During Cataphoric Pronoun Resolution JF - Journal of Psycholinguistic Research N2 - Previous research has shown that during cataphoric pronoun resolution, the predictive search for an antecedent is restricted by a structure-sensitive constraint known as ‘Condition C’, such that an antecedent is only considered when the constraint does not apply. Evidence has mainly come from self-paced reading (SPR), a method which may not be able to pick up on short-lived effects over the timecourse of processing. This study investigates whether or not the active search mechanism is constrained by Condition C at all points in time during cataphoric processing. We carried out one eye-tracking during reading and a parallel SPR experiment, accompanied by offline coreference judgment tasks. Although offline judgments about coreference were constrained by Condition C, the eye-tracking experiment revealed temporary consideration of antecedents that should be ruled out by Condition C. The SPR experiment using exactly the same materials indicated, conversely, that only structurally appropriate antecedents were considered. Taken together, our results suggest that the application of Condition C may be delayed during naturalistic reading. KW - Sentence processing KW - Cataphora KW - Pronouns KW - Binding KW - German KW - Eye-movement monitoring KW - Self-paced reading Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-018-9613-4 SN - 0090-6905 SN - 1573-6555 VL - 48 IS - 2 SP - 453 EP - 475 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Patterson, Clare A1 - Esaulova, Yulia A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - The impact of focus on pronoun resolution in native and non-native sentence comprehension JF - Second language research KW - clefts KW - discourse-level cues KW - focus KW - focus-sensitive particles KW - information structure KW - non-native speakers KW - pronoun resolution Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658317697786 SN - 0267-6583 SN - 1477-0326 VL - 33 SP - 403 EP - 429 PB - Sage Publ. CY - London ER -