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- Department Linguistik (59) (remove)
Purpose: This study reports on a cross-sectional investigation of lingual coarticulation in 57 typically developing German children (4 cohorts from 3.5 to 7 years of age) as compared with 12 adults. It examines whether the organization of lingual gestures for intrasyllabic coarticulation differs as a function of age and consonantal context. Method: Using the technique of ultrasound imaging, we recorded movement of the tongue articulator during the production of pseudowords, including various vocalic and consonantal contexts. Results: Results from linear mixed-effects models show greater lingual coarticulation in all groups of children as compared with adults with a significant decrease from the kindergarten years (at ages 3, 4, and 5 years) to the end of the 1st year into primary school (at age 7 years). Additional differences in coarticulation degree were found across and within age groups as a function of the onset consonant identity (/b/, / d/, and /g/). Conclusions: Results support the view that, although coarticulation degree decreases with age, children do not organize consecutive articulatory gestures with a uniform organizational scheme (e.g., segmental or syllabic). Instead, results suggest that coarticulatory organization is sensitive to the underlying articulatory properties of the segments combined.
Older adults demonstrate a slower speed of linguistic processing, including sentence processing. In nonlinguistic cognitive domains such as memory, research suggests that age-related slowing of processing speed may be a strategy adopted in order to avoid potential error and/or to spare “cognitive resources.” So far, very few studies have tested whether older adults’ slower processing speed in the linguistic domain has a strategic nature as well. To fill this gap, we tested whether older adults can maintain language processing accuracy when a faster processing speed is enforced externally. Specifically, we compared sentence comprehension accuracy in younger and older adults when sentences were presented at the participant’s median self-paced reading speed versus twice as fast. We hypothesized that an external speed increase will cause a smaller accuracy decline in older than younger adults because older adults tend to adopt self-paced processing speeds “further away” from their performance limits. The hypothesis was not confirmed: The decline in accuracy due to faster presentation did not differ by age group. Thus, we found no evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing of sentence processing. On the basis of our experimental design, we suggest that the age-related slowing of sentence processing is caused not only by motor slowdown, but also by a slowdown in cognitive processing
A close call
(2018)
The present study investigated how lexical selection is influenced by the number of semantically related representations (semantic neighbourhood density) and their similarity (semantic distance) to the target in a speeded picture-naming task. Semantic neighbourhood density and similarity as continuous variables were used to assess lexical selection for which competitive and noncompetitive mechanisms have been proposed. Previous studies found mixed effects of semantic neighbourhood variables, leaving this issue unresolved. Here, we demonstrate interference of semantic neighbourhood similarity with less accurate naming responses and a higher likelihood of producing semantic errors and omissions over accurate responses for words with semantically more similar (closer) neighbours. No main effect of semantic neighbourhood density and no interaction between semantic neighbourhood density and similarity was found. We assessed further whether semantic neighbourhood density can affect naming performance if semantic neighbours exceed a certain degree of semantic similarity. Semantic similarity between the target and each neighbour was used to split semantic neighbourhood density into two different density variables: The number of semantically close neighbours versus distant neighbours. The results showed a significant effect of close, but not of distant, semantic neighbourhood density: Naming pictures of targets with more close semantic neighbours led to longer naming latencies, less accurate responses, and a higher likelihood for the production of semantic errors and omissions over accurate responses. The results show that word inherent semantic attributes such as semantic neighbourhood similarity and the number of coactivated close semantic neighbours modulate lexical selection supporting theories of competitive lexical processing.
Recent treatment protocols have been successful in improving working memory (WM) in individuals with aphasia. However, the evidence to date is small and the extent to which improvements in trained tasks of WM transfer to untrained memory tasks, spoken sentence comprehension, and functional communication is yet poorly understood. To address these issues, we conducted a multiple baseline study with three German-speaking individuals with chronic post stroke aphasia. Participants practised two computerised WM tasks (n-back with pictures and aback with spoken words) four times a week for a month, targeting two WM processes: updating WM representations and resolving interference. All participants showed improvement on at least one measure of spoken sentence comprehension and everyday memory activities. Two of them showed improvement also on measures of WM and functional communication. Our results suggest that WM can be improved through computerised training in chronic aphasia and this can transfer to spoken sentence comprehension and functional communication in some individuals.
Infants as young as six months are sensitive to prosodic phrase boundaries marked by three acoustic cues: pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. Behavioral studies suggest that a language-specific weighting of these cues develops during the first year of life; recent work on German revealed that eight-month-olds, unlike six-month-olds, are capable of perceiving a prosodic boundary on the basis of pitch change and final lengthening only. The present study uses Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neuro-cognitive development of prosodic cue perception in German-learning infants. In adults’ ERPs, prosodic boundary perception is clearly reflected by the so-called Closure Positive Shift (CPS). To date, there is mixed evidence on whether an infant CPS exists that signals early prosodic cue perception, or whether the CPS emerges only later—the latter implying that infantile brain responses to prosodic boundaries reflect acoustic, low-level pause detection.
We presented six- and eight-month-olds with stimuli containing either no boundary cues, only a pitch cue, or a combination of both pitch change and final lengthening. For both age groups, responses to the former two conditions did not differ, while brain responses to prosodic boundaries cued by pitch change and final lengthening showed a positivity that we interpret as a CPS-like infant ERP component. This hints at an early sensitivity to prosodic boundaries that cannot exclusively be based on pause detection. Instead, infants’ brain responses indicate an early ability to exploit subtle, relational prosodic cues in speech perception—presumably even earlier than could be concluded from previous behavioral results.
Sensitivity to salience
(2018)
Sentence comprehension is optimised by indicating entities as salient through linguistic (i.e., information-structural) or visual means. We compare how salience of a depicted referent due to a linguistic (i.e., topic status) or visual cue (i.e., a virtual person's gaze shift) modulates sentence comprehension in German. We investigated processing of sentences with varying word order and pronoun resolution by means of self-paced reading and an antecedent choice task, respectively. Our results show that linguistic as well as visual salience cues immediately speeded up reading times of sentences mentioning the salient referent first. In contrast, for pronoun resolution, linguistic and visual cues modulated antecedent choice preferences less congruently. In sum, our findings speak in favour of a significant impact of linguistic and visual salience cues on sentence comprehension, substantiating that salient information delivered via language as well as the visual environment is integrated in the current mental representation of the discourse.
During a cue-distractor task, participants repeatedly produce syllables prompted by visual cues. Distractor syllables are presented to participants via headphones 150 ms after the visual cue (before any response). The task has been used to demonstrate perceptuomotor integration effects (perception effects on production): response times (RTs) speed up as the distractor shares more phonetic properties with the response. Here it is demonstrated that perceptuomotor integration is not limited to RTs. Voice Onset Times (VOTs) of the distractor syllables were systematically varied and their impact on responses was measured. Results demonstrate trial-specific convergence of response syllables to VOT values of distractor syllables.
In a preferential looking paradigm, we studied how children's looking behavior and pupillary response were modulated by the degree of phonological mismatch between the correct label of a target referent and its manipulated form. We manipulated degree of mismatch by introducing one or more featural changes to the target label. Both looking behavior and pupillary response were sensitive to degree of mismatch, corroborating previous studies that found differential responses in one or the other measure. Using time-course analyses, we present for the first time results demonstrating full separability among conditions (detecting difference not only between one vs. more, but also between two and three featural changes). Furthermore, the correct labels and small featural changes were associated with stable target preference, while large featural changes were associated with oscillating looking behavior, suggesting significant shifts in looking preference over time. These findings further support and extend the notion that early words are represented in great detail, containing subphonemic information.
Spectral change and duration as cues in Australian English listeners' front vowel categorization
(2018)
Australian English /iː/, /ɪ/, and /ɪə/ exhibit almost identical average first (F1) and second (F2) formant frequencies and differ in duration and vowel inherent spectral change (VISC). The cues of duration, F1 × F2 trajectory direction (TD) and trajectory length (TL) were assessed in listeners' categorization of /iː/ and /ɪə/ compared to /ɪ/. Duration was important for distinguishing both /iː/ and /ɪə/ from /ɪ/. TD and TL were important for categorizing /iː/ versus /ɪ/, whereas only TL was important for /ɪə/ versus /ɪ/. Finally, listeners' use of duration and VISC was not mutually affected for either vowel compared to /ɪ/.