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  - 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  -