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Prediction is often regarded as a central and domain-general aspect of cognition. This proposal extends to language, where predictive processing might enable the comprehension of rapidly unfolding input by anticipating upcoming words or their semantic features. To make these predictions, the brain needs to form a representation of the predictive patterns in the environment. Predictive processing theories suggest a continuous learning process that is driven by prediction errors, but much is still to be learned about this mechanism in language comprehension. This thesis therefore combined three electroencephalography (EEG) experiments to explore the relationship between prediction and implicit learning at the level of meaning.
Results from Study 1 support the assumption that the brain constantly infers und updates probabilistic representations of the semantic context, potentially across multiple levels of complexity. N400 and P600 brain potentials could be predicted by semantic surprise based on a probabilistic estimate of previous exposure and a more complex probability representation, respectively.
Subsequent work investigated the influence of prediction errors on the update of semantic predictions during sentence comprehension. In line with error-based learning, unexpected sentence continuations in Study 2 ¬– characterized by large N400 amplitudes ¬– were associated with increased implicit memory compared to expected continuations. Further, Study 3 indicates that prediction errors not only strengthen the representation of the unexpected word, but also update specific predictions made from the respective sentence context. The study additionally provides initial evidence that the amount of unpredicted information as reflected in N400 amplitudes drives this update of predictions, irrespective of the strength of the original incorrect prediction.
Together, these results support a central assumption of predictive processing theories: A probabilistic predictive representation at the level of meaning that is updated by prediction errors. They further propose the N400 ERP component as a possible learning signal. The results also emphasize the need for further research regarding the role of the late positive ERP components in error-based learning. The continuous error-based adaptation described in this thesis allows the brain to improve its predictive representation with the aim to make better predictions in the future.
The administrative language used in imperial and city chanceries illustrates formal language use in the Early Modern period, as most evident in its syntactic complexity. Since administrative language was considered prestigious by the literate people of the time, the syntactic features in question are increasingly found in other text types as well (Lötscher 1995, Schwitalla 2002). The present paper investigates early newspapers published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to evalute their degree of syntactic complexity and hence the extent of formal language used. Contrary to common belief (Admoni 1980, von Polenz 2013), it will be shown that early newspapers do not allow a uniform assessment in terms of their syntactic complexity, when they emerge as a new genre in the seventeenth century: some news segments display a fairly simple syntax, whereas others are of high syntactic complexity. By the end of the eighteenth century, the growing conventionalization of the new genre as well as the impact of standardization processes render newspapers much more balanced in terms of syntactic complexity. Unlike previous work on the syntactic complexity of newspaper language, the measurement of syntactic complexity takes into account not only sentence length and the relationship between independent and dependent clauses, but also the placement of adverbial clauses in relation to their associated clause.
Mental health of Japanese workers: amotivation mediates self-compassion on mental health problems
(2022)
Workplace mental health is a cause for concern in many countries. Globally, 78% of the workforce experienced impairment of their mental health in 2020. In Japan, more than half of employees are mentally distressed.
Previously, research has identified that self-compassion (i.e., being kind and understanding towards oneself) and work motivation were important to their mental health.
However, how these three components relate to each other remains to be elucidated. Accordingly, this study aimed to examine the relationship between mental health problems, self-compassion and work motivation (i.e., intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and amotivation).
A cross-sectional design was employed, where 165 Japanese workers completed self-report scales regarding those three components. A correlation and path analyses were conducted.
Mental health problems were positively associated with amotivation and negatively associated with age and self-compassion. While intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation did not mediate the impact of self-compassion on mental health problems, amotivation did.
The findings can help managers and organizational psychologists help identify effective approaches to improving work mental health.
This article explores the evolution of Cultural Linguistics, its fusion with Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Sociolinguistics, and its application to the study of world Englishes, emphasising the cultural dimension of language and cognition. It investigates key theoretical concepts in Cultural Linguistics such as cultural categories, schemas, conceptualisations, keywords, models and scenarios as essential analytical tools for examining the interplay between thought, language and culture. Using examples from English varieties in sub-Saharan Africa, Great Britain, Ireland, India and Hong Kong, this article demonstrates how these conceptual phenomena interact at increasing levels of conceptual complexity. The discussion also distinguishes conceptual metaphor (and metonymy) from the somewhat problematic concept of ‘cultural metaphor’, previously used in some cultural-linguistic approaches to world Englishes. Finally, the article delves into Conceptual Blending Theory as a possible extension of Cultural Linguistics that synthesises diverse cultural knowledge to interpret culture-specific expressions in contemporary multilingual settings.
This research bibliography lists some of the hallmark works in the field of Cultural Linguistics and has an exclusive thematic focus on cultural-linguistic approaches to world Englishes. Therefore, other important and congenial works that have been published under the umbrella of, for example, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) or deal with langauges other than English are excluded but can be found in the respective references of the individual contributions of this special issue. The research bibliography offers reference works for research strands of the world Englishes framework, such as English language teaching and language use in multicultural and multilingual contexts, as well as language use in the public space. Furthermore, with a collection of publications ranging from the 1980s to most recent state-of-the-art works from the year 2024, the authors identify trends and topical developments in the synthesized research of Cultural Linguistics and world Englishes and offer an outlook on new frontiers in this realm.
This book provides a novel analysis for the syntax of the clausal left periphery, focusing on various finite clause types and especially on embedded clauses. It investigates how the appearance of multiple projections interacts with economy principles and with the need for marking syntactic information overtly. In particular, the proposed account shows that a flexible approach assuming only a minimal number of projections is altogether favourable to cartographic approaches. The main focus of the book is on West Germanic, in particular on English and German, yet other Germanic and non-Germanic languages are also discussed for comparative purposes.
Cultural Linguistics
(2024)
Without a doubt, not only through numerous landmark publications (e.g., Sharifian 2003, 2011, 2015, 2017a, b), Farzad Sharifian has shaped the field of Cultural Linguistics like no one has. The success of Cultural Linguistics has been due, to a considerable extent, to the integration of previous theoretical concepts, methods, and terminologies into a unified theoretical approach. However, this process of integration, to our minds, has not been completed. In fact, the first author of this chapter, in a couple of his publications (Wolf et al. 2021; Kühmstedt and Wolf 2022) was about to enter into a terminological debate with Farzad Sharifian, when he left us too early. In this chapter, we would like to take up and systematize this debate. Primarily, as regards theory, we will focus on the relation of Cultural Linguistics to Cognitive Sociolinguistics, and as regards terminology, on the central concept of “cultural conceptualization.” By doing so, it is our hope to solidify the paradigm of Cultural Linguistics even more and to provide a further terminological refinement for “cultural conceptualization.”
Rhythmicity characterizes both interpersonal synchrony and spoken language. Emotions and language are forms of interpersonal communication, which interact with each other throughout development. We investigated whether and how emotional synchrony between mothers and their 9-month-old infants relates to infants' word segmentation as an early marker of language development. Twenty-six 9-month-old infants and their German-speaking mothers took part in the study. To measure emotional synchrony, we coded positive, neutral and negative emotional expressions of the mothers and their infants during a free play session. We then calculated the degree to which the mothers' and their infants' matching emotional expressions followed a predictable pattern. To measure word segmentation, we familiarized infants with auditory text passages and tested how long they looked at the screen while listening to familiar versus novel words. We found that higher levels of predictability (i.e. low entropy) during mother-infant interaction is associated with infants' word segmentation performance. These findings suggest that individual differences in word segmentation relate to the complexity and predictability of emotional expressions during mother-infant interactions.