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Previous studies on the acquisition of verb inflection in normally developing children have revealed an astonishing pattern: children use correctly inflected verbs in their own speech but fail to make use of verb inflections when comprehending sentences uttered by others. Thus, a three-year old might well be able to say something like ‘The cat sleeps on the bed’, but fails to understand that the same sentence, when uttered by another person, refers to only one sleeping cat but not more than one. The previous studies that have examined children's comprehension of verb inflections have employed a variant of a picture selection task in which the child was asked to explicitly indicate (via pointing) what semantic meaning she had inferred from the test sentence. Recent research on other linguistic structures, such as pronouns or focus particles, has indicated that earlier comprehension abilities can be found when methods are used that do not require an explicit reaction, like preferential looking tasks. This dissertation aimed to examine whether children are truly not able to understand the connection the the verb form and the meaning of the sentence subject until the age of five years or whether earlier comprehension can be found when a different measure, preferential looking, is used. Additionally, children's processing of subject-verb agreement violations was examined. The three experiments of this thesis that examined children's comprehension of verb inflections revealed the following: German-speaking three- to four-year old children looked more to a picture showing one actor when hearing a sentence with a singular inflected verb but only when their eye gaze was tracked and they did not have to perform a picture selection task. When they were asked to point to the matching picture, they performed at chance-level. This pattern indicates asymmetries in children's language performance even within the receptive modality. The fourth experiment examined sensitivity to subject-verb agreement violations and did not reveal evidence for sensitivity toward agreement violations in three- and four-year old children, but only found that children's looking patterns were influenced by the grammatical violations at the age of five. The results from these experiments are discussed in relation to the existence of a production-comprehension asymmetry in the use of verb inflections and children's underlying grammatical knowledge.
Successful communication is often explored by people throughout their life courses. To effectively transfer one’s own information to others, people employ various linguistic tools, such as word order information, prosodic cues, and lexical choices. The exploration of these linguistic cues is known as the study of information structure (IS). Moreover, an important issue in the language acquisition of children is the investigation of how they acquire IS. This thesis seeks to improve our understanding of how children acquire different tools (i.e., prosodical cues, syntactical cues, and the focus particle only) of focus marking in a cross linguistic perspective.
In the first study, following Szendrői and her colleagues (2017)- the sentence-picture verification task- was performed to investigate whether three- to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children as well as Mandarin-speaking adults could apply prosodic information to recognize focus in sentences. More, in the second study, not only Mandarin-speaking adults and Mandarin-speaking children but also German-speaking adults and German-speaking children were included to confirm the assumption that children could have adult-like performance in understanding sentence focus by identifying language specific cues in their mother tongue from early onwards. In this study, the same paradigm- the sentence-picture verification task- as in the first study was employed together with the eye-tracking method. Finally, in the last study, an issue of whether five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children could understand the pre-subject only sentence was carried out and again whether prosodic information would help them to better understand this kind of sentences.
The overall results seem to suggest that Mandarin-speaking children from early onwards could make use of the specific linguistic cues in their ambient language. That is, in Mandarin, a Topic-prominent and tone language, the word order information plays a more important rule than the prosodic information and even three-year-old Mandarin-speaking children could follow the word order information. More, although it seems that German-speaking children could follow the prosodic information, they did not have the adult-like performance in the object-accented condition. A feasible reason for this result is that there are more possibilities of marking focus in German, such as flexible word order, prosodic information, focus particles, and thus it would take longer time for German-speaking children to manage these linguistic tools. Another important empirical finding regarding the syntactically-marked focus in German is that it seems that the cleft construction is not a valid focus construction and this result corroborates with the previous observations (Dufter, 2009). Further, eye-tracking method did help to uncover how the parser direct their attention for recognizing focus. In the final study, it is showed that with explicit verbal context Mandarin-speaking children could understand the pre-subject only sentence and the study brought a better understanding of the acquisition of the focus particle- only with the Mandarin-speaking children.
While children acquire new words and simple sentence structures extremely fast and without much effort, the ability to process complex sentences develops rather late in life. Although the conjoint occurrence between brain-structural and brain-functional changes, the decrease of plasticity, and changes in cognitive abilities suggests a certain causality between these processes, concrete evidence for the relation between brain development, language processing, and language performance is rare. Therefore, the current dissertation investigates the tripartite relationship between behavior (in the form of language performance and cognitive maturation as prerequisite for language processing), brain structure (in the form of gray matter maturation), and brain function (in the form of brain activation evoked by complex sentence processing). Previous developmental studies indicate a missing increase of activation in accordance to sentence complexity (functional selectivity) in language-relevant brain areas in children. To determine the factors contributing to the functional development of language-relevant brain areas, different methodologies and data acquisition techniques were used to investigate the processing of center-embedded sentences in 5- and 6-year-old children, 7- and 8-year-old children, and adults. Behavioral results indicate that children between 5 and 8 years show difficulties in processing double embedded sentences and that their performance for these type of sentences is positively correlated with digit span. In 7- and 8-year-old children, it was found that especially the processing of long-distance relations between the initial phrase and its corresponding verb appears to be associated with the subject’s verbal working memory capacity. In contrast, children’s performance for double embedded sentences in the younger age group positively correlated with their performance in a standardized sentence comprehension test. This finding supports the hypothesis that processing difficulties in this age group may be mainly attributed to difficulties in processing case marking information. These findings are discussed with respect to current accounts of language and working memory development. A second study aimed at investigating the structural maturation of brain areas involved in sentence comprehension. To do this, whole-brain magnetic resonance images from 59 children between 5 and 8 years were collected and children’s gray matter was analyzed by using voxel-based morphometry. Children’s grammatical proficiency was assessed by a standardized sentence comprehension test. A confirmatory factory analysis corroborated a grammar-relevant and a verbal working memory-relevant factor underlying the measured performance. While children’s ability to assign thematic roles is positively correlated with gray matter probability (GMP) in the left inferior temporal gyrus and the left inferior frontal gyrus, verbal working memory-related performance is positively correlated with GMP in the left parietal operculum extending into the posterior superior temporal gyrus. These areas have been previously shown to be differentially engaged in adults’ complex sentence processing. Thus, the findings of the second study suggest a specific correspondence between children’s GMP in language-relevant brain regions and differential cognitive abilities which underlie complex sentence comprehension. In a third study, functional brain activity during the processing of center-embedded sentences was investigated in three different age groups (5–6 years, 7–8 years, and adults). Although all age groups engage a qualitatively comparable network of the left pars opercularis (PO), the left inferior parietal lobe extending into the posterior superior temporal gyrus (IPL/pSTG), the supplementary motor area (SMA) and the cerebellum, functional selectivity of these regions was only observable in adults. However, functional activation of the language-related regions (PO and IPL/pSTG) predicted sentence comprehension performance for all age groups. To solve the question of the complex interplay between different maturational factors, a fourth study analyzed the predictive power of gray matter probability, verbal working memory capacity, and behavioral differences in performance for simple and complex sentence for the functional selectivity of each activated region. These analyses revealed that the establishment of the adult-like functional selectivity for complex sentences is predicted by a reduction of the left PO’s gray matter probability across age groups while that of the IPL/pSTG is additionally predicted by verbal working memory capacity. Taken all findings together, the current thesis provides evidence that both structural brain maturation and verbal working memory expansion provide the basis for the emergence of functional selectivity in language-related brain regions leading to more efficient sentence processing during development.
Die Dissertation untersucht die Entwicklung der prosodischen Struktur von Simplizia und Komposita im Deutschen. Ausgewertet werden langzeitlich erhobene Produktionsdaten von vier monolingualen Kindern im Alter von 12 bis 26 Monaten. Es werden vier Entwicklungsstufen angenommen, in denen jedoch keine einheitlichen Outputs produziert werden. Die Asymmetrien zwischen den verschiedenen Wörtern werden systematisch auf die Struktur des Zielwortes zurückgeführt. In einer optimalitätstheoretischen Analyse wird gezeigt, dass sich die Entwicklungsstufen aus der Umordnung von Constraints ergeben und dass dasselbe Ranking die Variation zwischen den Worttypen zu einer bestimmten Entwicklungsstufe vorhersagt.
Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Fragestellung, ob die Frühgeburtlichkeit eine Auswirkung auf den Spracherwerb im ersten Lebensjahr hat. Insbesondere wurde der Frage nachgegangen, ob sich die Verarbeitung der rhythmisch-prosodischen Eigenschaften von Sprache im ersten Lebensjahr und deren weitere Ausnutzung für die Entwicklung des Lexikons bei sehr untergewichtigen Deutsch lernenden Frühgeborenen im Vergleich zu Reifgeborenen unterscheidet. Die besondere Spracherwerbssituation Frühgeborener liefert weitere Erkenntnisse bezüglich der Frage, inwieweit der frühe Spracherwerb durch prädeterminierte reifungsbedingte Mechanismen und Abläufe bestimmt wird und inwieweit dessen Verlauf und die relevanten Erwerbsmechanismen durch individuelle erfahrungsabhängige Faktoren beeinflusst werden. Damit liefern die Ergebnisse auch einen weiteren Beitrag zur Nature-Nurture-Diskussion.
Der W-Fragen-Erwerb stellt einen Teilbereich der kindlichen Syntaxentwicklung dar, die sich maßgeblich innerhalb der ersten drei Lebensjahre eines Kindes vollzieht. Eine wesentliche Rolle spielen dabei zwei Bewegungsoperationen, die sich auf die Position des Interrogativpronomens an die erste Stelle der W-Frage sowie die Position des Verbs an die zweite Stelle beziehen. In drei Studien wurde einerseits untersucht, ob deutschsprachige Kinder, die noch keine W-Fragen produzieren können, in der Lage sind, grammatische von ungrammatischen W-Fragen zu unterscheiden und andererseits, welche Leistungen sprachunauffällige und sprachauffällige deutschsprachige Kinder beim Verstehen und Korrigieren unterschiedlich komplexer W-Fragen (positive und negative W-Fragen) zeigen. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf ein frühes syntaktisches Wissen über W-Fragen im Spracherwerb hin und stützen damit die Annahme einer Kontinuität der kindlichen Grammatik zur Standardsprache. Auch scheinen sprachauffällige Kinder sich beim Erwerb von W-Fragen nicht qualitativ von sprachgesunden Kindern zu unterscheiden, sondern W-Fragen lediglich später korrekt umzusetzen. In beiden Populationen konnte ein syntaktischer Ökonomieeffekt beobachtet werden, der für eine spätere Umsetzung der Verbbewegung im Vergleich zur Bewegung des W-Elementes spricht.
Prosody is a rich source of information that heavily supports spoken language comprehension. In particular, prosodic phrase boundaries divide the continuous speech stream into chunks reflecting the semantic and syntactic structure of an utterance. This chunking or prosodic phrasing plays a critical role in both spoken language processing and language acquisition. Aiming at a better understanding of the underlying processing mechanisms and their acquisition, the present work investigates factors that influence prosodic phrase boundary perception in adults and infants. Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, three experimental studies examined the role of prosodic context (i.e., phrase length) in German phrase boundary perception and of the main prosodic boundary cues, namely pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. With regard to the boundary cues, the dissertation focused on the questions which cues or cue combination are essential for the perception of a prosodic boundary and on whether and how this cue weighting develops during infancy.
Using ERPs is advantageous because the technique captures the immediate impact of (linguistic) information during on-line processing. Moreover, as it can be applied independently of specific task demands or an overt response performance, it can be used with both infants and adults. ERPs are particularly suitable to study the time course and underlying mechanisms of boundary perception, because a specific ERP component, the Closure Positive Shift (CPS) is well established as neuro-physiological indicator of prosodic boundary perception in adults.
The results of the three experimental studies first underpin that the prosodic context plays an immediate role in the processing of prosodic boundary information. Moreover, the second study reveals that adult listeners perceive a prosodic boundary also on the basis of a sub-set of the boundary cues available in the speech signal. Both ERP and simultaneously collected behavioral data (i.e., prosodic judgements) suggest that the combination of pitch change and final lengthening triggers boundary perception; however, when presented as single cues, neither pitch change nor final lengthening were sufficient. Finally, testing six- and eight-month-old infants shows that the early sensitivity for prosodic information is reflected in a brain response resembling the adult CPS. For both age groups, brain responses to prosodic boundaries cued by pitch change and final lengthening revealed a positivity that can be interpreted as a CPS-like infant ERP component. In contrast, but comparable to the adults’ response pattern, pitch change as a single cue does not provoke an infant CPS. These results show that infant phrase boundary perception is not exclusively based on pause detection and hint at an early ability to exploit subtle, relational prosodic cues in speech perception.
Die Studie untersucht den Erwerb der frühen Verbmorphologie im Estnischen. Als Datengrundlage der Arbeit dienen Spontansprachaufnahmen von 10 estnischsprachigen Kindern im Alter zwischen 10 und 32 Monaten. Die Studie versucht eine detaillierte Analyse des Erwerbs des estnischsprachigen Verbmorphologie vorzunehmen. Dabei werden die aufeinander folgenden Entwicklungsstadien, ihre ungefähren Altersgrenzen, sowie Erwerbsreihenfolge dargestellt und mit typologisch unterschiedlichen Sprachen verglichen.
Processing negative imperatives in Bulgarian : evidence from normal, aphasic and child language
(2010)
The incremental nature of sentence processing raises questions about the way the information of incoming functional elements is accessed and subsequently employed in building the syntactic structure which sustains interpretation processes. The present work approaches these questions by investigating the negative particle ne used for sentential negation in Bulgarian and its impact on the overt realisation and the interpretation of imperative inflexion, bound aspectual morphemes and clitic pronouns in child, adult and aphasic language. In contrast to other Slavic languages, Bulgarian negative imperatives (NI) are grammatical only with imperfective verbs. We argue that NI are instantiations of overt aspectual coercion induced by the presence of negation as a temporally sensitive sentential operator. The scope relation between imperative mood, negation, and aspect yields the configuration of the imperfective present which in Bulgarian has to be overtly expressed and prompts the imperfective marking of the predicate. The regular and transparent application of the imperfectivising mechanism relates to the organisation of the TAM categories in Bulgarian which not only promotes the representation of fine perspective shifts but also provides for their distinct morphological expression. Using an elicitation task with NI, we investigated the way 3- and 4-year-old children represent negation in deontic contexts as reflected in their use of aspectually appropriate predicates. Our findings suggest that children are sensitive to the imperfectivity requirement in NI from early on. The imperfectivisation strategies reveal some differences from the target morphological realisation. The relatively low production of target imperfectivised prefixed verbs cannot be explained with morphological processing deficits, but rather indicates that up to the age of five children experience difficulties to apply a progressive view point to accomplishments. Two self-paced reading studies present evidence that neurologically unimpaired Bulgarian speakers profit from the syntactic and prosodic properties of negation during online sentence comprehension. The imperfectivity requirement negation imposes on the predicate speeds up lexical access to imperfective verbs. Similarly, clitic pronouns are more accessible after negation due to the phono-syntactic properties of clitic clusters. As the experimental stimuli do not provide external discourse referents, personal pronouns are parsed as object agreement markers. Without subsequent resolution, personal pronouns appear to be less resource demanding than reflexive clitics. This finding is indicative of the syntax-driven co-reference establishment processes triggered through the lexical specification of reflexive clitics. The results obtained from Bulgarian Broca's aphasics show that they exhibit processing patterns similar to those of the control group. Notwithstanding their slow processing speed, the agrammatic group showed no impairment of negation as reflected by their sensitivity to the aspectual requirements of NI, and to the prosodic constraints on clitic placement. The aphasics were able to parse the structural dependency between mood, negation and aspect as functional categories and to represent it morphologically. The prolonged reaction times (RT) elicited by prefixed verbs indicate increasing processing costs due to the semantic integration of prefixes as perfectivity markers into an overall imperfective construal. This inference is supported by the slower RT to reflexive clitics, which undergo a structurally triggered resolution. Evaluated against cross-linguistic findings, the obtained result strongly suggests that aphasic performance with pronouns depends on the interpretation efforts associated with co-reference establishment and varies due to availability of discourse referents. The investigation of normal and agrammatic processing of Bulgarian NI presents support for the hypothesis that the comprehension deficits in Broca's aphasia result from a slowed-down implementation of syntactic operations. The protracted structure building consumes processing resources and causes temporal mismatches with other processes sustaining sentence comprehension. The investigation of the way Bulgarian children and aphasic speakers process NI reveals that both groups are highly sensitive to the imperfective constraint on the aspectual construal imposed by the presence of negation. The imperfective interpretation requires access to morphologically complex verb forms which contain aspectual morphemes with conflicting semantic information – perfective prefixes and imperfective suffixes. Across modalities, both populations exhibit difficulties in processing prefixed imperfectivised verbs which as predicates of negative imperative sentences reflect the inner perspective the speaker and the addressee need to take towards a potentially bounded situation description.
Das vorliegende Werk stellt sich anhand einer longitudinal angelegten Fallstudie einem Forschungsdesiderat: der mehrsprachigen Erwerbskonstellation Kurmancî-Kurdisch und Deutsch. Über einen Zeitraum von etwa acht Monaten werden die Sprachentwicklung und Sprachkompetenz von sechs Kindern im Vorschulalter in Kurmancî-Kurdisch und in Deutsch mit diversen Instrumenten erfasst und analysiert, wobei auch die weiteren Sprachen der Studienkinder sorgfältig herausarbeitet und im Zusammenhang mit ihren ersten beiden Sprachen erläutert werden. Die Studie setzt sich auch mit dem Einfluss der Familiensprachpraxis auf die Sprachentwicklung und Sprachkompetenz auseinander. In diesem Zusammenhang wird außerdem die Rolle der bislang einmaligen bilingualen kurdisch-deutschen Kindertagesstätte Pîya mit in die Analyse einbezogen. Entsprechend vielfältig und vielsichtig sind die Ergebnisse dieser Studie.