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 - TY - JOUR A1 - Arslan, Seçkin A1 - Gür, Eren A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Predicting the sources of impaired wh-question comprehension in non-fluent aphasia BT - a cross-linguistic machine learning study on Turkish and German JF - Cognitive neuropsychology N2 - This study investigates the comprehension of wh-questions in individuals with aphasia (IWA) speaking Turkish, a non-wh-movement language, and German, a wh-movement language. We examined six German-speaking and 11 Turkish-speaking IWA using picture-pointing tasks. Findings from our experiments show that the Turkish IWA responded more accurately to both object who and object which questions than to subject questions, while the German IWA performed better for subject which questions than in all other conditions. Using random forest models, a machine learning technique used in tree-structured classification, on the individual data revealed that both the Turkish and German IWA’s response accuracy is largely predicted by the presence of overt and unambiguous case marking. We discuss our results with regard to different theoretical approaches to the comprehension of wh-questions in aphasia. KW - Non-fluent aphasia KW - random forest algorithm KW - sentence comprehension KW - wh-in-situ KW - wh-questions KW - wh-movement Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2017.1394284 SN - 0264-3294 SN - 1464-0627 VL - 34 SP - 312 EP - 331 PB - Taylor & Francis 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 - 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 - GEN A1 - Felser, Claudia A1 - Phillips, Colin A1 - Wagers, Matthew T1 - Editorial: Encoding and Navigating Linguistic Representations in Memory T2 - Frontiers in psychology KW - sentence comprehension KW - encoding KW - memory retrieval KW - interference KW - anaphor resolution KW - agreement processing KW - filler-gap dependencies Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00164 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 8 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jessen, Anna A1 - Festman, Julia A1 - Boxell, Oliver A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Native and non-native speakers' brain responses to filled indirect Object Gaps JF - Journal of Psycholinguistic Research N2 - We examined native and non-native English speakers’ processing of indirect object wh-dependencies using a filled-gap paradigm while recording event-related potentials (ERPs). The non-native group was comprised of native German-speaking, proficient non-native speakers of English. Both participant groups showed evidence of linking fronted indirect objects to the subcategorizing verb when this was encountered, reflected in an N400 component. Evidence for continued filler activation beyond the verb was seen only in the non-native group, in the shape of a prolonged left-anterior negativity. Both participant groups showed sensitivity to filled indirect object gaps reflected in a P600 response, which was more pronounced and more globally distributed in our non-native group. Taken together, our results indicate that resolving indirect object dependencies is a two-step process in both native and non-native sentence comprehension, with greater processing cost incurred in non-native compared to native comprehension. KW - Sentence processing KW - Wh-movement KW - Filled gaps KW - ERPs Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-017-9496-9 SN - 0090-6905 SN - 1573-6555 VL - 46 SP - 1319 EP - 1338 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Clahsen, Harald A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Some notes on the shallow structure hypothesis T2 - Studies in second language acquisition N2 - Since the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) was first put forward in 2006, it has inspired a growing body of research on grammatical processing in nonnative (L2) speakers. More than 10 years later, we think it is time for the SSH to be reconsidered in the light of new empirical findings and current theoretical assumptions about human language processing. The purpose of our critical commentary is twofold: to clarify some issues regarding the SSH and to sketch possible ways in which this hypothesis might be refined and improved to better account for L1 and L2 speakers’ performance patterns. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263117000250 SN - 0272-2631 SN - 1470-1545 VL - 40 IS - 3 SP - 693 EP - 706 PB - Cambridge University Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Arslan, Seckin A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Comprehension of wh-questions in Turkish-German bilinguals with aphasia BT - a dual-case study JF - Clinical linguistics & phonetics N2 - The aim of our study was to examine the extent to which linguistic approaches to sentence comprehension deficits in aphasia can account for differential impairment patterns in the comprehension of wh-questions in bilingual persons with aphasia (PWA). We investigated the comprehension of subject and object wh-questions in both Turkish, a wh-in-situ language, and German, a wh-fronting language, in two bilingual PWA using a sentence-to-picture matching task. Both PWA showed differential impairment patterns in their two languages. SK, an early bilingual PWA, had particular difficulty comprehending subject which-questions in Turkish but performed normal across all conditions in German. CT, a late bilingual PWA, performed more poorly for object which-questions in German than in all other conditions, whilst in Turkish his accuracy was at chance level across all conditions. We conclude that the observed patterns of selective cross-linguistic impairments cannot solely be attributed either to difficulty with wh-movement or to problems with the integration of discourse-level information. Instead our results suggest that differences between our PWA’s individual bilingualism profiles (e.g. onset of bilingualism, premorbid language dominance) considerably affected the nature and extent of their impairments. KW - Bilingual aphasia KW - wh-questions KW - Turkish-German bilingualism KW - wh-in-situ KW - wh-movement Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2017.1416493 SN - 0269-9206 SN - 1464-5076 VL - 32 IS - 7 SP - 640 EP - 660 PB - Taylor & Francis Group CY - Philadelphia ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boxell, Oliver A1 - Felser, Claudia A1 - Cunnings, Ian T1 - Antecedent contained deletions in native and non-native sentence processing JF - Linguistic approaches to bilingualism N2 - We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring study investigating native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers’ real-time processing of antecedent-contained deletion (ACD), a type of verb phrase ellipsis in which the ellipsis gap forms part of its own antecedent. The resulting interpretation problem is traditionally thought to be solved by quantifier raising, a covert scope-shifting operation that serves to remove the gap from within its antecedent. Our L2 group comprised advanced, native German-speaking L2 learners of English. The analysis of the eye-movement data showed that both L1 and L2 English speakers tried to recover the missing verb phrase after encountering the gap. Only the native speakers showed evidence of ellipsis resolution being affected by quantification, however. No effects of quantification following gap detection were found in the L2 group, by contrast, indicating that recovery of the elided material was accomplished independently from the object’s quantificational status in this group. KW - L2 processing KW - eye-movement monitoring KW - antecedent contained deletion Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15006.box SN - 1879-9264 SN - 1879-9272 VL - 7 IS - 5 SP - 554 EP - 582 PB - John Benjamins Publishing Co. CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - GEN A1 - Arslan, Seçkin A1 - Gür, Eren A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Predicting the sources of impaired wh-question comprehension in non-fluent aphasia BT - a cross-linguistic machine learning study on Turkish and German T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - This study investigates the comprehension of wh-questions in individuals with aphasia (IWA) speaking Turkish, a non-wh-movement language, and German, a wh-movement language. We examined six German-speaking and 11 Turkish-speaking IWA using picture-pointing tasks. Findings from our experiments show that the Turkish IWA responded more accurately to both object who and object which questions than to subject questions, while the German IWA performed better for subject which questions than in all other conditions. Using random forest models, a machine learning technique used in tree-structured classification, on the individual data revealed that both the Turkish and German IWA’s response accuracy is largely predicted by the presence of overt and unambiguous case marking. We discuss our results with regard to different theoretical approaches to the comprehension of wh-questions in aphasia. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 464 KW - Non-fluent aphasia KW - random forest algorithm KW - sentence comprehension KW - wh-in-situ KW - wh-questions KW - wh-movement Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-412717 IS - 464 ER -