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Previous research has shown that heritage speakers struggle with inflectional morphology. 'Limitations of online resources' for processing a non-dominant language has been claimed as one possible reason for these difficulties. To date, however, there is very little experimental evidence on real-time language processing in heritage speakers. Here we report results from a masked priming experiment with 97 bilingual (Turkish/German) heritage speakers and a control group of 40 non-heritage speakers of Turkish examining regular and irregular forms of the Turkish aorist. We found that, for the regular aorist, heritage speakers use the same morphological decomposition mechanism ('affix stripping') as control speakers, whereas for processing irregularly inflected forms they exhibited more variability (i.e., less homogeneous performance) than the control group. Heritage speakers also demonstrated semantic priming effects. At a more general level, these results indicate that heritage speakers draw on multiple sources of information for recognizing morphologically complex words.
Most studies investigating the impact of literacy on oral language processing have shown that literacy provides phonological awareness skills in the processing of oral language. The implications of these results on aphasia tests could be significant and pose questions on the adequacy of such tools for testing non-literate individuals. Aiming at examining the impact of literacy on oral language processing and its implication on aphasia tests, this study tested 12 non-literate and 12 literate individuals with a modified Amharic version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (Paradis and Amberber, 1991, Bilingual Aphasia Test. Amharic version. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.). The problems of phonological awareness skills in oral language processing in non-literates are substantiated. In addition, compared with literate participants, non-literate individuals demonstrated difficulties in the word/sentence-picture matching tasks. This study has also revealed that the Amharic version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test may be viable for testing Amharic-speaking non-literate individuals with aphasia when modifications are incorporated.
This study presents new insights into null subjects, topic drop and the interpretation of topic-dropped elements. Besides providing an empirical data survey, it offers explanations to well-known problems, e.g. syncretisms in the context of null-subject licensing or the marginality of dropping an element which carries oblique case. The book constitutes a valuable source for both empirically and theoretically interested (generative) linguists.
Production of regular and non-regular verbs : evidence for a lexical entry complexity account
(2010)
The incredible productivity and creativity of language depends on two fundamental resources: a mental lexicon and a mental grammar. Rules of grammar enable us to produce and understand complex phrases we have not encountered before and at the same time constrain the computation of complex expressions. The concepts of the mental lexicon and mental grammar have been thoroughly tested by comparing the use of regular versus non-regular word forms. Regular verbs (e.g. walk-walked) are computed using a suffixation rule in a neural system for grammatical processing; non-regular verbs (run-ran) are retrieved from associative memory. The role of regularity has only been explored for the past tense, where regularity is overtly visible. To explore the representation and encoding of regularity as well as the inflectional processes involved in the production of regular and non-regular verbs, this dissertation investigated three groups of German verbs: regular, irregular and hybrid verbs. Hybrid verbs in German have completely regular conjugation in the present tense and irregular conjugation in the past tense. Articulation latencies were measured while participants named pictures of actions, producing the 3rd person singular of regular, hybrid, and irregular verbs in present and past tense. Studying the production of German verbs in past and present tense, this dissertation explored the complexity of lexical entries as a decisive factor in the production of verbs.
Distributed optimality
(2001)
In this thesis I propose a synthesis (Distributed Optimality, DO) between Optimality Theory (OT, Prince & Smolensky, 1993) and a morphological framework in a genuine derivational tradition, namely Distributed Morphology (DM) as developed by Halle & Marantz (1993). By carrying over the apparatus of OT to DM, phenomena which are captured in DM by language-specific rules or features of lexical entries, are given a more principled account in the terms of ranked universal constraints. On the other hand, also the DM part makes two contributions, namely strong locality and impoverishment. The first gives rise to a simple formal interpretation of DO, while the latter is shown to be indispensable in any theoretically satisfying account of agreement morphology. The empirical basis of the work is given by the complex agreement morphology of genetically different languages. Theoretical focus is mainly on two areas: First, so-called direction marking which is shown to be preferably treated in terms of constraints on feature realization. Second, the effects of precedence constraints which are claimed to regulate the status of agreement affixes as prefixes or suffixes and their respective order. A universal typology for the order of agreement categories by means of OT-constraints is proposed.
The individual’s mental lexicon comprises all known words as well related infor-mation on semantics, orthography and phonology. Moreover, entries connect due to simi-larities in these language domains building a large network structure. The access to lexical information is crucial for processing of words and sentences. Thus, a lack of information in-hibits the retrieval and can cause language processing difficulties. Hence, the composition of the mental lexicon is essential for language skills and its assessment is a central topic of lin-guistic and educational research.
In early childhood, measurement of the mental lexicon is uncomplicated, for example through parental questionnaires or the analysis of speech samples. However, with growing content the measurement becomes more challenging: With more and more words in the mental lexicon, the inclusion of all possible known words into a test or questionnaire be-comes impossible. That is why there is a lack of methods to assess the mental lexicon for school children and adults. For the same reason, there are only few findings on the courses of lexical development during school years as well as its specific effect on other language skills. This dissertation is supposed to close this gap by pursuing two major goals: First, I wanted to develop a method to assess lexical features, namely lexicon size and lexical struc-ture, for children of different age groups. Second, I aimed to describe the results of this method in terms of lexical development of size and structure. Findings were intended to help understanding mechanisms of lexical acquisition and inform theories on vocabulary growth.
The approach is based on the dictionary method where a sample of words out of a dictionary is tested and results are projected on the whole dictionary to determine an indi-vidual’s lexicon size. In the present study, the childLex corpus, a written language corpus for children in German, served as the basis for lexicon size estimation. The corpus is assumed to comprise all words children attending primary school could know. Testing a sample of words out of the corpus enables projection of the results on the whole corpus. For this purpose, a vocabulary test based on the corpus was developed. Afterwards, test performance of virtual participants was simulated by drawing different lexicon sizes from the corpus and comparing whether the test items were included in the lexicon or not. This allowed determination of the relation between test performance and total lexicon size and thus could be transferred to a sample of real participants. Besides lexicon size, lexical content could be approximated with this approach and analyzed in terms of lexical structure.
To pursue the presented aims and establish the sampling method, I conducted three consecutive studies. Study 1 includes the development of a vocabulary test based on the childLex corpus. The testing was based on the yes/no format and included three versions for different age groups. The validation grounded on the Rasch Model shows that it is a valid instrument to measure vocabulary for primary school children in German. In Study 2, I estab-lished the method to estimate lexicon sizes and present results on lexical development dur-ing primary school. Plausible results demonstrate that lexical growth follows a quadratic function starting with about 6,000 words at the beginning of school and about 73,000 words on average for young adults. Moreover, the study revealed large interindividual differences. Study 3 focused on the analysis of network structures and their development in the mental lexicon due to orthographic similarities. It demonstrates that networks possess small-word characteristics and decrease in interconnectivity with age.
Taken together, this dissertation provides an innovative approach for the assessment and description of the development of the mental lexicon from primary school onwards. The studies determine recent results on lexical acquisition in different age groups that were miss-ing before. They impressively show the importance of this period and display the existence of extensive interindividual differences in lexical development. One central aim of future research needs to address the causes and prevention of these differences. In addition, the application of the method for further research (e.g. the adaptation for other target groups) and teaching purposes (e.g. adaptation of texts for different target groups) appears to be promising.
The paper revisits Duffield's (2007) (Duffield, Nigel. 2007. Aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure: Separating tense from assertion. Linguistics 45(4). 765-814) analysis of the correlation between the position of a 'when'-phrase and the temporal reference of a bare sentence in Vietnamese. Bare sentences in Vietnamese, based on (Smith, Carlota S. & Mary S. Erbaugh. 2005. Temporal interpretation in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics 43(4). 713-756), are argued to obtain their temporal interpretation from their aspectual composition, and the default temporal reference: bounded events are located in the past, unbounded events at present. It is shown that the correlation so observed in when-questions is superficial, and is tied to the syntax and semantics of temporal modification and the requirement that temporal adverbials denoting future time is base generated in sentence-initial position, and past time adverbials in sentence-final position. A 'when'-phrase, being temporally underspecified, obtains its temporal value from its base position. However, the correlation between word order and temporal reference in argument wh-questions and declaratives is factual, depending on whether the predicate-argument configuration allows for a telic interpretation or not. To be specific, it is dependent on whether the application of Generic Modification (Snyder, William. 2012. Parameter theory and motion predicates. In Violeta Demonte & Louise McNally (eds.), Telicity, change, and state. Acrosscategorial view of event structure, 279-299. Oxford: Oxford University Press) or accomplishment composition is realized. Canonical declaratives, and argument wh-questions, with telicity inducing material, license GM or accomplishment composition, yielding bounded events, hence past; by contrast, their noncanonical counterparts block GM or accomplishment composition, giving rise to unbounded event descriptions, hence non-past.
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.
It has been long agreed by formal and functional researchers (primarily based on English data) that contrastive topic marking, namely marking a constituent as a contrastive topic via the B-accent/the rising intonation contour) requires the co-occurrence of focus marking via the A-accent/the falling intonation contour (see Sturgeon 2006, and references therein). However, this consensus has recently been disputed by new findings indicating the occurrence of utterances with only B-accent, dubbed as lone contrastive topic (Büring 2003, Constant 2014). In this paper, I argue, based on the data in Vietnamese, that the presence of lone contrastive topic is just apparent, and that the focus that co-occurs with the seemingly lone contrastive topic is a verum focus.