TY - JOUR A1 - Omane, Paul Okyere A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Acquiring syntactic variability BT - The production of Wh-questions in children and adults speaking Akan JF - Frontiers in communication N2 - This paper investigates the predictions of the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis by studying the acquisition of wh-questions in 4- and 5-year-old Akan-speaking children in an experimental approach using an elicited production and an elicited imitation task. Akan has two types of wh-question structures (wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions), which allows an investigation of children’s acquisition of these two question structures and their preferences for one or the other. Our results show that adults prefer to use wh-ex-situ questions over wh-in-situ questions. The results from the children show that both age groups have the two question structures in their linguistic repertoire. However, they differ in their preferences in usage in the elicited production task: while the 5-year-olds preferred the wh-in-situ structure over the wh-ex-situ structure, the 4-year-olds showed a selective preference for the wh-in-situ structure in who-questions. These findings suggest a developmental change in wh-question preferences in Akan-learning children between 4 and 5 years of age with a so far unobserved u-shaped developmental pattern. In the elicited imitation task, all groups showed a strong tendency to maintain the structure of in-situ and ex-situ questions in repeating grammatical questions. When repairing ungrammatical ex-situ questions, structural changes to grammatical in-situ questions were hardly observed but the insertion of missing morphemes while keeping the ex-situ structure. Together, our findings provide only partial support for the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis. KW - Akan KW - wh-questions KW - wh-in-situ KW - wh-ex-situ KW - derivational complexity KW - language acquisition Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.604951 SN - 2297-900X VL - 2021 PB - Frontiers Media CY - Lausanne, Schweiz ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Dipper, Stefanie A1 - Götze, Michael A1 - Stede, Manfred A1 - Wegst, Tillmann T1 - ANNIS BT - a linguistic database for exploring information structure JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of our first version of the database "ANNIS" ("ANNotation of Information Structure"). For research based on empirical data, ANNIS provides a uniform environment for storing this data together with its linguistic annotations. A central database promotes standardized annotation, which facilitates interpretation and comparison of the data. ANNIS is used through a standard web browser and offers tier-based visualization of data and annotations, as well as search facilities that allow for cross-level and cross-sentential queries. The paper motivates the design of the system, characterizes its user interface, and provides an initial technical evaluation of ANNIS with respect to data size and query processing. Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8432 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 IS - 1 SP - 245 EP - 279 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kitagawa, Yoshihisa ED - Ishihara, Shinichiro ED - Petrova, Svetlana ED - Schwarz, Anne T1 - When we fail to question in Japanese JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - When we pay close attention to the prosody of Wh-questions in Japanese, we discover many novel and interesting empirical puzzles that would require us to devise a much finer syntactic component of grammar. This paper addresses the issues that pose some problems to such an elaborated grammar, and offers solutions, making an appeal to the information structure and sentence processing involved in the interpretation of interrogative and focus constructions. KW - focus KW - (implicit) prosody KW - information structure KW - processing KW - Wh-question Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-24481 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 VL - 9 SP - 29 EP - 64 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jannedy, Stefanie A1 - Mendoza-Denton, Norma T1 - Structuring information through gesture and intonation JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - Face-to-face communication is multimodal. In unscripted spoken discourse we can observe the interaction of several "semiotic layers", modalities of information such as syntax, discourse structure, gesture, and intonation. We explore the role of gesture and intonation in structuring and aligning information in spoken discourse through a study of the co-occurrence of pitch accents and gestural apices. Metaphorical spatialization through gesture also plays a role in conveying the contextual relationships between the speaker, the government and other external forces in a naturally-occurring political speech setting. KW - gesture KW - intonation KW - spoken discourse KW - narrative structure KW - political speech KW - affect Y1 - 2005 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8774 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 IS - 3 SP - 199 EP - 244 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Teich, Elke A1 - Fankhauser, Peter T1 - Exploring lexical patterns in text BT - lexical cohesion analysis with WordNet JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - We present a system for the linguistic exploration and analysis of lexical cohesion in English texts. Using an electronic thesaurus-like resource, Princeton WordNet, and the Brown Corpus of English, we have implemented a process of annotating text with lexical chains and a graphical user interface for inspection of the annotated text. We describe the system and report on some sample linguistic analyses carried out using the combined thesaurus-corpus resource. Y1 - 2005 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8685 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 IS - 2 SP - 129 EP - 145 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Tomioka, Satoshi ED - Ishihara, Shinichiro ED - Petrova, Svetlana ED - Schwarz, Anne T1 - Intervention effects in focus BT - from a Japanese point of view JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - The most recent trend in the studies of LF intervention effects makes crucial reference to focusing effects on the interveners, and this paper critically examines the representative analyses of the focus-based approach. While each analysis has its own merits and shortcomings, I argue that a pragmatic analysis that does not make appeal to syntactic configurations is better equipped to deal with many of the complex and delicate facts surrounding intervention effects. KW - Intervention Effect KW - Alternative Semantics KW - Whinterrogatives KW - Focus KW - Topic KW - Post-Focus Reduction Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-24502 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 VL - 9 SP - 97 EP - 118 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kubozono, Haruo ED - Ishihara, Shinichiro ED - Petrova, Svetlana ED - Schwarz, Anne T1 - Focus and intonation in Japanese BT - Does focus trigger pitch reset? JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - This paper discusses how focus changes prosodic structure in Tokyo Japanese. It is generally believed that focus blocks the intonational process of downstep and causes a pitch reset. This paper presents experimental evidence against this traditional view by looking at the prosodic behavior of Wh words, which receive focus lexically in Japanese as in other languages. It is demonstrated, specifically, that the focused Wh element does not block downstep although it receives a much higher pitch than its preceding element. This suggests that presence of lexical focus does not trigger pitch reset in Japanese. KW - Focus KW - Intonation KW - Japanese KW - Pitch Reset KW - Downstep Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-24472 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 VL - 9 SP - 1 EP - 27 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stone, Kate A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Malsburg, Titus von der T1 - Does entropy modulate the prediction of German long-distance verb particles? JF - PLOS ONE N2 - In this paper we examine the effect of uncertainty on readers’ predictions about meaning. In particular, we were interested in how uncertainty might influence the likelihood of committing to a specific sentence meaning. We conducted two event-related potential (ERP) experiments using particle verbs such as turn down and manipulated uncertainty by constraining the context such that readers could be either highly certain about the identity of a distant verb particle, such as turn the bed […] down, or less certain due to competing particles, such as turn the music […] up/down. The study was conducted in German, where verb particles appear clause-finally and may be separated from the verb by a large amount of material. We hypothesised that this separation would encourage readers to predict the particle, and that high certainty would make prediction of a specific particle more likely than lower certainty. If a specific particle was predicted, this would reflect a strong commitment to sentence meaning that should incur a higher processing cost if the prediction is wrong. If a specific particle was less likely to be predicted, commitment should be weaker and the processing cost of a wrong prediction lower. If true, this could suggest that uncertainty discourages predictions via an unacceptable cost-benefit ratio. However, given the clear predictions made by the literature, it was surprisingly unclear whether the uncertainty manipulation affected the two ERP components studied, the N400 and the PNP. Bayes factor analyses showed that evidence for our a priori hypothesised effect sizes was inconclusive, although there was decisive evidence against a priori hypothesised effect sizes larger than 1μV for the N400 and larger than 3μV for the PNP. We attribute the inconclusive finding to the properties of verb-particle dependencies that differ from the verb-noun dependencies in which the N400 and PNP are often studied. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267813 SN - 1932-6203 SP - 1 EP - 25 PB - PLOS ONE CY - San Francisco, California, US ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Endriss, Cornelia A1 - Hinterwimmer, Stefan T1 - The influence of tense in adverbial quantification JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - We argue that there is a crucial difference between determiner and adverbial quantification. Following Herburger [2000] and von Fintel [1994], we assume that determiner quantifiers quantify over individuals and adverbial quantifiers over eventualities. While it is usually assumed that the semantics of sentences with determiner quantifiers and those with adverbial quantifiers basically come out the same, we will show by way of new data that quantification over events is more restricted than quantification over individuals. This is because eventualities in contrast to individuals have to be located in time which is done using contextual information according to a pragmatic resolution strategy. If the contextual information and the tense information given in the respective sentence contradict each other, the sentence is uninterpretable. We conclude that this is the reason why in these cases adverbial quantification, i.e. quantification over eventualities, is impossible whereas quantification over individuals is fine. KW - Adverbial Quantification KW - Covert Variables KW - Domain Restriction KW - Quantificational Variability Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8409 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 IS - 1 SP - 121 EP - 151 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stone, Kate A1 - Nicenboim, Bruno A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Rösler, Frank T1 - Understanding the effects of constraint and predictability in ERP JF - Neurobiology of language N2 - Intuitively, strongly constraining contexts should lead to stronger probabilistic representations of sentences in memory. Encountering unexpected words could therefore be expected to trigger costlier shifts in these representations than expected words. However, psycholinguistic measures commonly used to study probabilistic processing, such as the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, are sensitive to word predictability but not to contextual constraint. Some research suggests that constraint-related processing cost may be measurable via an ERP positivity following the N400, known as the anterior post-N400 positivity (PNP). The PNP is argued to reflect update of a sentence representation and to be distinct from the posterior P600, which reflects conflict detection and reanalysis. However, constraint-related PNP findings are inconsistent. We sought to conceptually replicate Federmeier et al. (2007) and Kuperberg et al. (2020), who observed that the PNP, but not the N400 or the P600, was affected by constraint at unexpected but plausible words. Using a pre-registered design and statistical approach maximising power, we demonstrated a dissociated effect of predictability and constraint: strong evidence for predictability but not constraint in the N400 window, and strong evidence for constraint but not predictability in the later window. However, the constraint effect was consistent with a P600 and not a PNP, suggesting increased conflict between a strong representation and unexpected input rather than greater update of the representation. We conclude that either a simple strong/weak constraint design is not always sufficient to elicit the PNP, or that previous PNP constraint findings could be an artifact of smaller sample size. KW - N400 KW - anterior PNP KW - posterior P600 KW - probabilistic processing KW - constraint KW - predictability KW - entropy Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00094 SN - 2641-4368 VL - 4 IS - 2 SP - 221 EP - 256 PB - MIT Press CY - Cambridge, MA, USA ER -