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Restrictions on addition
(2012)
Children up to school age have been reported to perform poorly when interpreting sentences containing restrictive and additive focus particles by treating sentences with a focus particle in the same way as sentences without it. Careful comparisons between results of previous studies indicate that this phenomenon is less pronounced for restrictive than for additive particles. We argue that this asymmetry is an effect of the presuppositional status of the proposition triggered by the additive particle. We tested this in two experiments with German-learning three-and four-year-olds using a method that made the exploitation of the information provided by the particles highly relevant for completing the task. Three-year-olds already performed remarkably well with sentences both with auch 'also' and with nur 'only'. Thus, children can consider the presuppositional contribution of the additive particle in their sentence interpretation and can exploit the restrictive particle as a marker of exhaustivity.
Using the eye-movement monitoring technique in two reading comprehension experiments, this study investigated the timing of constraints on wh-dependencies (so-called island constraints) in first- and second-language (L1 and L2) sentence processing. The results show that both L1 and L2 speakers of English are sensitive to extraction islands during processing, suggesting that memory storage limitations affect L1 and L2 comprehenders in essentially the same way. Furthermore, these results show that the timing of island effects in L1 compared to L2 sentence comprehension is affected differently by the type of cue (semantic fit versus filled gaps) signaling whether dependency formation is possible at a potential gap site. Even though L1 English speakers showed immediate sensitivity to filled gaps but not to lack of semantic fit, proficient German-speaking learners of English as a L2 showed the opposite sensitivity pattern. This indicates that initial wh-dependency formation in L2 processing is based on semantic feature matching rather than being structurally mediated as in L1 comprehension.
Strings of words can correspond to more than one interpretation or underlying structure, which makes them ambiguous. Prosody can be used to resolve this structural ambiguity. This dissertation investigates the use of prosodic cues in the domains of fundamental frequency (f0) and duration to disambiguate between two interpretations of ambiguous structures when speakers addressed different interlocutors. The dissertation comprises of three production studies and one comprehension study.
Prosodic disambiguation was studied with a focus on German name sequences of three names (coordinates) in two conditions: without (Name1 and Name2 and Name3) and with internal grouping of the first two names ([Name1 and Name2] and Name3). The study of coordinates was complemented with production data of locally ambiguous sentences with a case-ambiguous first noun phrase.
Variability was studied in a controlled setting: Productions were elicited with a within-subject manipulation of context in a referential communication task in order to evoke prosodic adaptations to different conversational contexts. Context had five levels and involved interlocutors in three age groups (child, young adult, elderly adult) with German as L1 in the absence of background white noise, the young adult with background white noise, and a young adult without German as L1. Variability was explored at different levels: within a group of young individuals (intra-group level), within and between young individuals (intra-individual level and inter-individual level, respectively), and comparing between the group of young and a group of older speakers (inter-group level).
Our data replicate the use of the three prosodic cues (f0-movement, final lengthening, and pause) in productions of young adult speakers and extend their use to productions of older adult speakers. Both age groups distinguished consistently between the two coordinate conditions. Prosodic grouping in production was evident not only on the group-final Name2 but also at earlier stages in the utterance, on the group-internal Name1 (early cues). For some speakers, some listeners were able to decode these early cues effectively as they were able to reliably predict the upcoming structure after listening to Name1 only. Thus, prosodic grouping appears as a globally marked phenomenon building up along the utterance. The internal structure of coordinates was disambiguated irrespective of the conversational context. In our data, speakers only slightly modified the prosodic cues marking the disambiguation in the different contexts. Listeners were unable to identify to which interlocutor the sequence had been produced. We interpret this intra-individual consistency in the production of disambiguating prosodic cues as support for a strong link between prosody and syntax. The findings support models in favour of situational independence of disambiguating prosody. All speakers reliably marked the distinction between the grouping conditions with at least one of the three prosodic cues investigated and most of the speakers used at least two of these cues. Further, individual differences in prosodic grouping did not lead to difficulties in recovering the grouping in comprehension. Taken together, these findings support the existence of a phonological category of prosodic grouping.
This thesis investigates the comprehension of the passive voice in three distinct populations. First, the comprehension of passives by adult German speakers was studied, followed by an examination of how German-speaking children comprehend the structure. Finally, bilingual Mandarin-English speakers were tested on their comprehension of the passive voice in English, which is their L2. An integral part of testing the comprehension in all three populations is the use of structural priming. In each of the three distinct parts of the research, structural priming was used for a specific reason. In the study involving adult German speakers, productive and receptive structural priming was directly compared. The goal was to see the effect the two priming modalities have on language comprehension. In the study on German-acquiring children, structural priming was an important tool in answering the question regarding the delayed acquisition of the passive voice. Finally, in the study on the bilingual population, cross-linguistic priming was used to investigate the importance of word order in the priming effect, since Mandarin and English have different word orders in passive voice sentences.
The study reported in this paper involved the employment
of specific in-class exercises using a Personal Response System (PRS).
These exercises were designed with two goals: to enhance students’
capabilities of tracing a given code and of explaining a given code in
natural language with some abstraction. The paper presents evidence
from the actual use of the PRS along with students’ subjective impressions
regarding both the use of the PRS and the special exercises. The
conclusions from the findings are followed with a short discussion on
benefits of PRS-based mental processing exercises for learning programming
and beyond.