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Left peripheral focus
(2010)
In Czech, German, and many other languages, part of the semantic focus
of the utterance can be moved to the left periphery of the clause. The main generalization is that only the leftmost accented part of the semantic focus can be moved. We propose that movement to the left periphery is generally triggered by an unspecific edge feature of C (Chomsky 2008) and its restrictions can be attributed to requirements of cyclic linearization, modifying the theory of cyclic linearization developed by Fox and Pesetsky (2005). The crucial assumption is that structural accent is a direct consequence of being linearized at merge, thus it is indirectly relevant for (locality restrictions on) movement. The absence of structural accent correlates with given-ness. Given elements may later receive (topic or contrastive) accents, which accounts for fronting in multiple focus/contrastive topic constructions. Without any additional assumptions, the model can account for movement of pragmatically unmarked elements to the left periphery (‘formal fronting’, Frey 2005). Crucially, the analysis makes no reference at all to concepts of information structure in the syntax, in line with the claim of Chomsky (2008) that UG specifies no direct link between syntax and information structure.
Sentences with doubly center-embedded relative clauses in which a verb phrase (VP) is missing are sometimes perceived as grammatical, thus giving rise to an illusion of grammaticality. In this paper, we provide a new account of why missing-VP sentences, which are both complex and ungrammatical, lead to an illusion of grammaticality, the so-called missing-VP effect. We propose that the missing-VP effect in particular, and processing difficulties with multiply center-embedded clauses more generally, are best understood as resulting from interference during cue-based retrieval. When processing a sentence with double center-embedding, a retrieval error due to interference can cause the verb of an embedded clause to be erroneously attached into a higher clause. This can lead to an illusion of grammaticality in the case of missing-VP sentences and to processing complexity in the case of complete sentences with double center-embedding. Evidence for an interference account of the missing-VP effect comes from experiments that have investigated the missing-VP effect in German using a speeded grammaticality judgments procedure. We review this evidence and then present two new experiments that show that the missing-VP effect can be found in German also with less restricting procedures. One experiment was a questionnaire study which required grammaticality judgments from participants without imposing any time constraints. The second experiment used a self-paced reading procedure and did not require any judgments. Both experiments confirm the prior findings of missing-VP effects in German and also show that the missing-VP effect is subject to a primacy effect as known from the memory literature. Based on this evidence, we argue that an account of missing-VP effects in terms of interference during cue-based retrieval is superior to accounts in terms of limited memory resources or in terms of experience with embedded structures.
Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing.
Filling the Silence
(2016)
In a self-paced reading experiment, we investigated the processing of sluicing constructions (“sluices”) whose antecedent contained a known garden-path structure in German. Results showed decreased processing times for sluices with garden-path antecedents as well as a disadvantage for antecedents with non-canonical word order downstream from the ellipsis site. A post-hoc analysis showed the garden-path advantage also to be present in the region right before the ellipsis site. While no existing account of ellipsis processing explicitly predicted the results, we argue that they are best captured by combining a local antecedent mismatch effect with memory trace reactivation through reanalysis.
We elicited the production of various types of relative clauses in a group of German-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls in order to test the movement optionality account of grammatical difficulty in SLI. The results show that German-speaking children with SLI are impaired in relative clause production compared to typically developing children. The alternative structures that they produce consist of simple main clauses, as well as nominal and prepositional phrases produced in isolation, sometimes contextually appropriate, and sometimes not. Crucially for evaluating the movement optionality account, children with SLI produce very few instances of embedded clauses where the relative clause head noun is pronounced in situ; in fact, such responses are more common among the typically developing child controls. These results underscore the difficulty German-speaking children with SLI have with structures involving movement, but provide no specific support for the movement optionality account.
SOPARSE predicts so-called local coherence effects: locally plausible but globally impossible parses of substrings can exert a distracting influence during sentence processing. Additionally, it predicts digging-in effects: the longer the parser stays committed to a particular analysis, the harder it becomes to inhibit that analysis. We investigated the interaction of these two predictions using German sentences. Results from a self-paced reading study show that the processing difficulty caused by a local coherence can be reduced by first allowing the globally correct parse to become entrenched, which supports SOPARSE’s assumptions.
We examined the effects of argument-head distance in SVO and SOV languages (Spanish and German), while taking into account readers' working memory capacity and controlling for expectation (Levy, 2008) and other factors. We predicted only locality effects, that is, a slowdown produced by increased dependency distance (Gibson, 2000; Lewis and Vasishth, 2005). Furthermore, we expected stronger locality effects for readers with low working memory capacity. Contrary to our predictions, low-capacity readers showed faster reading with increased distance, while high-capacity readers showed locality effects. We suggest that while the locality effects are compatible with memory-based explanations, the speedup of low-capacity readers can be explained by an increased probability of retrieval failure. We present a computational model based on ACT-R built under the previous assumptions, which is able to give a qualitative account for the present data and can be tested in future research. Our results suggest that in some cases, interpreting longer RTs as indexing increased processing difficulty and shorter RTs as facilitation may be too simplistic: The same increase in processing difficulty may lead to slowdowns in high-capacity readers and speedups in low-capacity ones. Ignoring individual level capacity differences when investigating locality effects may lead to misleading conclusions.
The predictions of two contrasting approaches to the acquisition of transitive relative clauses were tested within the same groups of German-speaking participants aged from 3 to 5 years old. The input frequency approach predicts that object relative clauses with inanimate heads (e.g., the pullover that the man is scratching) are comprehended earlier and more accurately than those with an animate head (e.g., the man that the boy is scratching). In contrast, the structural intervention approach predicts that object relative clauses with two full NP arguments mismatching in number (e.g., the man that the boys are scratching) are comprehended earlier and more accurately than those with number-matching NPs (e.g., the man that the boy is scratching). These approaches were tested in two steps. First, we ran a corpus analysis to ensure that object relative clauses with number-mismatching NPs are not more frequent than object relative clauses with number-matching NPs in child directed speech. Next, the comprehension of these structures was tested experimentally in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds respectively by means of a color naming task. By comparing the predictions of the two approaches within the same participant groups, we were able to uncover that the effects predicted by the input frequency and by the structural intervention approaches co-exist and that they both influence the performance of children on transitive relative clauses, but in a manner that is modulated by age. These results reveal a sensitivity to animacy mismatch already being demonstrated by 3-year-olds and show that animacy is initially deployed more reliably than number to interpret relative clauses correctly. In all age groups, the animacy mismatch appears to explain the performance of children, thus, showing that the comprehension of frequent object relative clauses is enhanced compared to the other conditions. Starting with 4-year-olds but especially in 5-year-olds, the number mismatch supported comprehension—a facilitation that is unlikely to be driven by input frequency. Once children fine-tune their sensitivity to verb agreement information around the age of four, they are also able to deploy number marking to overcome the intervention effects. This study highlights the importance of testing experimentally contrasting theoretical approaches in order to characterize the multifaceted, developmental nature of language acquisition.
We report two corpus analyses to examine the impact of animacy, definiteness, givenness and type of referring expression on the ordering of double objects in the spontaneous speech of German-speaking two- to four-year-old children and the child-directed speech of their mothers. The first corpus analysis revealed that definiteness, givenness and type of referring expression influenced word order variation in child language and child-directed speech when the type of referring expression distinguished between pronouns and lexical noun phrases. These results correspond to previous child language studies in English (e.g., de Marneffe et al. 2012). Extending the scope of previous studies, our second corpus analysis examined the role of different pronoun types on word order. It revealed that word order in child language and child-directed speech was predictable from the types of pronouns used. Different types of pronouns were associated with different sentence positions but also showed a strong correlation to givenness and definiteness. Yet, the distinction between pronoun types diminished the effects of givenness so that givenness had an independent impact on word order only in child-directed speech but not in child language. Our results support a multi-factorial approach to word order in German. Moreover, they underline the strong impact of the type of referring expression on word order and suggest that it plays a crucial role in the acquisition of the factors influencing word order variation.
Rechtschreibung von Konsonantenclustern und morphologische Bewusstheit bei Grundschüler_innen
(2018)
Die vorliegenden Studien untersuchen die Entwicklung der Rechtschreibfähigkeit für finale Konsonantencluster im Deutschen und die ihr zugrundeliegenden Strategien bei Erst- bis Drittklässler_innen (N = 209). Dazu wurde der Einfluss der morphologischen Komplexität (poly- vs. monomorphematische Cluster) auf die Rechtschreibung qualitativ und quantitativ analysiert, sowie mit einer Messung zur morphologischen Bewusstheit korreliert. Von der ersten Klasse an zeigt sich eine hohe Korrektheit in der Schreibung und somit eine sprachspezifisch schnelle Entwicklung der alphabetischen Rechtschreibstrategie für finale Konsonantencluster. Der Einfluss morphologischer Verarbeitungsprozesse wurde allerdings erst für die Drittklässler_innen gefunden. Obwohl bereits die Erstklässler_innen gut entwickelte morphologische Bewusstheit zeigten, scheinen sie noch nicht in der Lage zu sein, diese bei der Rechtschreibung anzuwenden. Die Ergebnisse werden im Kontrast zu den umfangreicher vorliegenden Befunden für die englische Sprache diskutiert.