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This study examines the processing of sentences with and without subject verb agreement violations in German-speaking children at three and five years of age. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to measure whether children's looking behavior was influenced by the grammaticality of the test sentences. The older group of children turned their gaze faster towards a target picture and looked longer at it when the object noun referring to the target was presented in a grammatical sentence with subject verb agreement compared to when the object noun was presented in a sentence in which an agreement violation occurred. The younger group of children displayed less conclusive results, with a tendency to look longer but not faster towards the target picture in the grammatical compared to the ungrammatical condition. This is the first experimental evidence that German-speaking five-year old children are sensitive to subject verb agreement and violations thereof. Our results additionally substantiate that the eye-tracking paradigm is suitable to examine children's sensitivity to subtle grammatical violations.
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 givenness. 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.
While it is widely acknowledged in the formal semantic literature that both the truth-functional focus particle only and it-clefts convey exhaustiveness, the nature and source of exhaustiveness effects with it-clefts remain contested. We describe a questionnaire study (n = 80) and an event-related brain potentials (ERP) study (n = 16) that investigated the violation of exhaustiveness in German only-foci versus it-clefts. The offline study showed that a violation of exhaustivity with only is less acceptable than the violation with it-clefts, suggesting a difference in the nature of exhaustivity interpretation in the two environments. The ERP-results confirm that this difference can be seen in online processing as well: a violation of exhaustiveness in only-foci elicited a centro-posterior positivity (600-800ms), whereas a violation in it-clefts induced a globally distributed N400 pattern (400-600ms). The positivity can be interpreted as a reanalysis process and more generally as a process of context updating. The N400 effect in it-clefts is interpreted as indexing a cancelation process that is functionally distinct from the only case. The ERP study is, to our knowledge, the first evidence from an online experimental paradigm which shows that the violation of exhaustiveness involves different underlying processes in the two structural environments.
This thesis investigates the processing of non-canonical word orders and whether non-canonical orders involving object topicalizations, midfield scrambling and particle verbs are treated the same by native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers. The two languages investigated are Norwegian and German.
32 L1 Norwegian and 32 L1 German advanced learners of Norwegian were tested in two experiments on object topicalization in Norwegian. The results from the online self-paced reading task and the offline agent identification task show that both groups are able to identify the non-canonical word order and show a facilitatory effect of animate subjects in their reanalysis. Similarly high error rates in the agent identification task suggest that globally unambiguous object topicalizations are a challenging structure for L1 and L2 speakers alike.
The same participants were also tested in two experiments on particle placement in Norwegian, again using a self-paced reading task, this time combined with an acceptability rating task. In the acceptability rating L1 and L2 speakers show the same preference for the verb-adjacent placement of the particle over the non-adjacent placement after the direct object. However, this preference for adjacency is only found in the L1 group during online processing, whereas the L2 group shows no preference for either order.
Another set of experiments tested 33 L1 German and 39 L1 Slavic advanced learners of German on object scrambling in ditransitive clauses in German. Non-native speakers accept both object orders and show neither a preference for either order nor a processing advantage for the canonical order. The L1 group, in contrast, shows a small, but significant preference for the canonical dative-first order in the judgment and the reading task.
The same participants were also tested in two experiments on the application of the split rule in German particle verbs. Advanced L2 speakers of German are able to identify particle verbs and can apply the split rule in V2 contexts in an acceptability judgment task in the same way as L1 speakers. However, unlike the L1 group, the L2 group is not sensitive to the grammaticality manipulation during online processing. They seem to be sensitive to the additional lexical information provided by the particle, but are unable to relate the split particle to the preceding verb and recognize the ungrammaticality in non-V2 contexts.
Taken together, my findings suggest that non-canonical word orders are not per se more difficult to identify for L2 speakers than L1 speakers and can trigger the same reanalysis processes as in L1 speakers. I argue that L2 speakers’ ability to identify a non-canonical word order depends on how the non-canonicity is signaled (case marking vs. surface word order), on the constituents involved (identical vs. different word types), and on the impact of the word order change on sentence meaning. Non-canonical word orders that are signaled by morphological case marking and cause no change to the sentence’s content are hard to detect for L2 speakers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
MULTILIT
(2015)
This paper presents an overview of the linguistic analyses developed in the MULTILIT project and the processing of the oral and written texts collected. The project investigates the language abilities of multilingual children and adolescents, in particular, those who have Turkish and/or Kurdish as a mother tongue. A further aim of the project is to examine from a psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspective the extent to which competence in academic registers is achieved on the basis of the languages spoken by the children, including the language(s) spoken at the home, the language of the country of residence and the first foreign language. To be able to examine these questions using corpus linguistic parameters, we created categories of analysis in MULTILIT.
The data collection comprises texts from bilingual and monolingual children and adolescents in Germany in their first language Turkish, their second language German und their foreign language English. Pupils aged between nine and twenty years of age produced monologue oral and written texts in the two genres of narrative and discursive. On the basis of these samples, we examine linguistic features such as lexical expression (lexical density, lexical diversity), syntactic complexity (syntactic and discursive packaging) as well as phonology in the oral texts and orthography in the written texts, with the aim of investigating the pupils’ growing mastery of these features in academic and informal registers.
To this end the raw data have been transcribed by the use of transcription conventions developed especially for the needs of the MULTILIT data. They are based on the commonly used HIAT and GAT transcription conventions and supplemented with conventions that provide additional information such as features at the graphic level.
The categories of analysis comprise a large number of linguistic categories such as word classes, syntax, noun phrase complexity, complex verbal morphology, direct speech and text structures. We also annotate errors and norm deviations at a wide range of levels (orthographic, morphological, lexical, syntactic and textual). In view of the different language systems, these criteria are considered separately for all languages investigated in the project.