Refine
Document Type
- Article (8)
- Doctoral Thesis (2)
- Postprint (2)
Language
- English (12)
Keywords
- comprehension (12) (remove)
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.
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.
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.
Agrammatic speakers of languages with overt grammatical case show impaired use of the morphological cues to establish theta-role relations in sentences presented in non-canonical word orders. We analysed the effect of word order on the sentence comprehension of aphasic speakers of Basque, an ergative, free word order and head-final (SOV) language. Ergative languages such as Basque establish a one-to-one mapping of the thematic role and the case marker. We collected behavioural and gaze-fixation data while agrammatic speakers performed a picture-matching task with auditorily presented sentences with different word orders. We found that people with aphasia (PWA) had difficulties in assigning theta-roles in Theme-Agent order. This result is in line with processing accounts. Contrary to previous findings, our data do not suggest a systematic delay in the integration of morphological information in the PWA group, but strong reliance on the ergative case morphology and difficulties assigning thematic roles into the determiner phrases.
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.
Previous studies have shown that multilingual speakers are influenced by their native (L1) and non-native (L2) grammars when learning a new language. But, so far, these studies have mostly used untimed metalinguistic tasks. Here we examine whether multilinguals’ prior grammars also affect their sensitivity to morphosyntactic constraints during processing. We use speeded judgment and self-paced reading tasks to examine the comprehension of German possessive pronouns. To investigate whether native and non-native grammars differentially affect participants’ performance, we compare two groups of non-native German speakers with inverse L1–L2 distributions: a group with L1 Spanish – L2 English, and a group with L1 English – L2 Spanish. We show that the reading profiles of both groups are modulated by their L1 grammar, with L2 proficiency selectively affecting participants’ judgment accuracy but not their reading times. We propose that reading comprehension is mainly influenced by multilinguals’ native grammar, but that knowledge of an L2 grammar can further increase sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations in an additional language.
The effect of decay and lexical uncertainty on processing long-distance dependencies in reading
(2020)
To make sense of a sentence, a reader must keep track of dependent relationships between words, such as between a verb and its particle (e.g. turn the music down). In languages such as German, verb-particle dependencies often span long distances, with the particle only appearing at the end of the clause. This means that it may be necessary to process a large amount of intervening sentence material before the full verb of the sentence is known. To facilitate processing, previous studies have shown that readers can preactivate the lexical information of neighbouring upcoming words, but less is known about whether such preactivation can be sustained over longer distances. We asked the question, do readers preactivate lexical information about long-distance verb particles? In one self-paced reading and one eye tracking experiment, we delayed the appearance of an obligatory verb particle that varied only in the predictability of its lexical identity. We additionally manipulated the length of the delay in order to test two contrasting accounts of dependency processing: that increased distance between dependent elements may sharpen expectation of the distant word and facilitate its processing (an antilocality effect), or that it may slow processing via temporal activation decay (a locality effect). We isolated decay by delaying the particle with a neutral noun modifier containing no information about the identity of the upcoming particle, and no known sources of interference or working memory load. Under the assumption that readers would preactivate the lexical representations of plausible verb particles, we hypothesised that a smaller number of plausible particles would lead to stronger preactivation of each particle, and thus higher predictability of the target. This in turn should have made predictable target particles more resistant to the effects of decay than less predictable target particles. The eye tracking experiment provided evidence that higher predictability did facilitate reading times, but found evidence against any effect of decay or its interaction with predictability. The self-paced reading study provided evidence against any effect of predictability or temporal decay, or their interaction. In sum, we provide evidence from eye movements that readers preactivate long-distance lexical content and that adding neutral sentence information does not induce detectable decay of this activation. The findings are consistent with accounts suggesting that delaying dependency resolution may only affect processing if the intervening information either confirms expectations or adds to working memory load, and that temporal activation decay alone may not be a major predictor of processing time.
Previous studies have suggested that distinctive case marking on noun phrases reduces attraction effects in production, i.e., the tendency to produce a verb that agrees with a nonsubject noun. An important open question is whether attraction effects are modulated by case information in sentence comprehension. To address this question, we conducted three attraction experiments in Armenian, a language with a rich and productive case system. The experiments showed clear attraction effects, and they also revealed an overall role of case marking such that participants showed faster response and reading times when the nouns in the sentence had different case. However, we found little indication that distinctive case marking modulated attraction effects. We present a theoretical proposal of how case and number information may be used differentially during agreement licensing in comprehension. More generally, this work sheds light on the nature of the retrieval cues deployed when completing morphosyntactic dependencies.