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This study investigates the characteristics of narrative-speech production and the use of verbs in Turkish agrammatic speakers (n = 10) compared to non-brain-damaged controls (n = 10). To elicit narrative-speech samples, personal interviews and storytelling tasks were conducted. Turkish has a large and regular verb inflection paradigm where verbs are inflected for evidentiality (i.e. direct versus indirect evidence available to the speaker). Particularly, we explored the general characteristics of the speech samples (e.g. utterance length) and the uses of lexical, finite and non-finite verbs and direct and indirect evidentials. The results show that speech rate is slow, verbs per utterance are lower than normal and the verb diversity is reduced in the agrammatic speakers. Verb inflection is relatively intact; however, a trade-off pattern between inflection for direct evidentials and verb diversity is found. The implications of the data are discussed in connection with narrative-speech production studies on other languages.
Traxler, Pickering, and Clifton (1998) found that ambiguous sentences are read faster than their unambiguous counterparts. This so-called ambiguity advantage has presented a major challenge to classical theories of human sentence comprehension (parsing) because its most prominent explanation, in the form of the unrestricted race model (URM), assumes that parsing is non-deterministic. Recently, Swets, Desmet, Clifton, and Ferreira (2008) have challenged the URM. They argue that readers strategically underspecify the representation of ambiguous sentences to save time, unless disambiguation is required by task demands. When disambiguation is required, however, readers assign sentences full structure—and Swets et al. provide experimental evidence to this end. On the basis of their findings, they argue against the URM and in favor of a model of task-dependent sentence comprehension. We show through simulations that the Swets et al. data do not constitute evidence for task-dependent parsing because they can be explained by the URM. However, we provide decisive evidence from a German self-paced reading study consistent with Swets et al.'s general claim about task-dependent parsing. Specifically, we show that under certain conditions, ambiguous sentences can be read more slowly than their unambiguous counterparts, suggesting that the parser may create several parses, when required. Finally, we present the first quantitative model of task-driven disambiguation that subsumes the URM, and we show that it can explain both Swets et al.'s results and our findings.
Accessing morphosyntax in L1 and L2 word recognition A priming study of inflected German adjectives
(2016)
In fusional languages, inflectional affixes may encode multiple morphosyntactic features such as case, number, and gender. To determine how these features are accessed during both native (L1) and non-native (L2) word recognition, the present study compares the results from a masked visual priming experiment testing inflected adjectives of German to those of a previous overt (cross-modal) priming experiment on the same phenomenon. While for the L1 group both experiments produced converging results, a group of highly-proficient Russian L2 learners of German showed native-like modulations of repetition priming effects under overt, but not under masked priming conditions. These results indicate that not only affixes but also their morphosyntactic features are accessible during initial form-based lexical access, albeit only for L1 and not for L2 processing. We argue that this contrast is in line with other findings suggesting that non-native language processing is less influenced by structural information than the L1.
Age of acquisition (AOA) is a psycholinguistic variable that significantly influences behavioural measures (response times and accuracy rates) in tasks that require lexical and semantic processing. Its origin is – unlike the origin of semantic typicality (TYP), which is assumed at the semantic level – controversially discussed. Different theories propose AOA effects to originate either at the semantic level or at the link between semantics and phonology (lemma-level).
The dissertation aims at investigating the influence of AOA and its interdependence with the semantic variable TYP on particularly semantic processing in order to pinpoint the origin of AOA effects. Therefore, three studies have been conducted that considered the variables AOA and TYP in semantic processing tasks (category verifications and animacy decisions) by means of behavioural and partly electrophysiological (ERP) data and in different populations (healthy young and elderly participants and in semantically impaired individuals with aphasia (IWA)).
The behavioural and electrophysiological data of the three studies provide evidence for distinct processing levels of the variables AOA and TYP. The data further support previous assumptions on a semantic origin for TYP but question the same for AOA. The findings, however, support an origin of AOA effects at the transition between the word form (phonology) and the semantic level that can be captured at the behavioural but not at the electrophysiological level.
An exploration of rhythmic grouping of speech sequences by french- and german-learning infants
(2016)
Rhythm in music and speech can be characterized by a constellation of several acoustic cues. Individually, these cues have different effects on rhythmic perception: sequences of sounds alternating in duration are perceived as short-long pairs (weak-strong/iambicpattern), whereas sequences of sounds alternating in intensity or pitch are perceived as loud-soft, or high-low pairs (strong-weak/trochaic pattern). This perceptual bias-called the lambic-Trochaic Law (ITL) has been claimed to be an universal property of the auditory system applying in both the music and the language domains. Recent studies have shown that language experience can modulate the effects of the ITL on rhythmic perception of both speech and non-speech sequences in adults, and of non-speech sequences in 7.5-month-old infants. The goal of the present study was to explore whether language experience also modulates infants' grouping of speech. To do so, we presented sequences of syllables to monolingual French- and German-learning 7.5-month-olds. Using the Headturn Preference Procedure (HPP), we examined whether they were able to perceive a rhythmic structure in sequences of syllables that alternated in duration, pitch, or intensity. Our findings show that both French- and German-learning infants perceived a rhythmic structure when it was cued by duration or pitch but not intensity. Our findings also show differences in how these infants use duration and pitch cues to group syllable sequences, suggesting that pitch cues were the easier ones to use. Moreover, performance did not differ across languages, failing to reveal early language effects on rhythmic perception. These results contribute to our understanding of the origin of rhythmic perception and perceptual mechanisms shared across music and speech, which may bootstrap language acquisition.
Discourse production is crucial for communicative success and is in the core of aphasia assessment and treatment. Coherence differentiates discourse from a series of utterances/sentences; it is internal unity and connectedness, and, as such, perhaps the most inherent property of discourse. It is unclear whether people with aphasia, who experience various language production difficulties, preserve the ability to produce coherent discourse. A more general question of how coherence is established and represented linguistically has been addressed in the literature, yet remains unanswered. This dissertation presents an investigation of discourse production in aphasia and the linguistic mechanisms of establishing coherence.
This article first outlines different ways of how psycholinguists have dealt with linguistic diversity and illustrates these approaches with three familiar cases from research on language processing, language acquisition, and language disorders. The second part focuses on the role of morphology and morphological variability across languages for psycholinguistic research. The specific phenomena to be examined are to do with stem-formation morphology and inflectional classes; they illustrate how experimental research that is informed by linguistic typology can lead to new insights.
My thesis focused on the predictions of the activation-based model of Lewis and Vasishth (2005) to investigate the evidence for the use of the memory system in the formation of non-local dependencies in sentence comprehension.
The activation-based model, which follows the Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational framework (ACT-R; Anderson et al., 2004), has been used to explain locality effects and similarity-based interference by assuming that dependencies are resolved by a cue-based retrieval mechanism, and that the retrieval mechanism is affected by decay and interference.
Both locality effects and (inhibitory) similarity-based interference cause increased difficulty (e.g., longer reading times) at the site of the dependency completion where a retrieval is assumed: (I) Locality effects are attributed to the increased difficulty in the retrieval of a dependent when the distance from its retrieval site is increased. (II) Similarity-based interference is attributed to the retrieval being affected by the presence of items which have similar features as the dependent that needs to be retrieved.
In this dissertation, I investigated some findings problematic to the activation-based model, namely, facilitation where locality effects are expected (e.g., Levy, 2008), and the lack of similarity-based interference from the number feature in grammatical sentences (e.g., Wagers et al., 2009). In addition, I used individual differences in working memory capacity and reading fluency as a way to validate the theories investigated (Underwood, 1975), and computational modeling to achieve a more precise account of the phenomena.
Regarding locality effects, by using self-paced reading and eye-tracking-while reading methods with Spanish and German data, this dissertation yielded two main findings: (I) Locality effects seem to be modulated by working memory capacity, with high-capacity participants showing expectation-driven facilitation. (II) Once expectations and other potential confounds are controlled using baselines, with increased distance, high-capacity readers can show a slow-down (i.e., locality effects) and low-capacity readers can show a speedup. While the locality effects are compatible with the activation-based model, simulations show that the speedup of low-capacity readers can only be accounted for by changing some of the assumptions of the activation-based model.
Regarding similarity-based interference, two relatively high-powered self-paced reading experiments in German using grammatical sentences yielded a slowdown at the verb as predicted by the activation-based model. This provides evidence in favor of dependency creation via cue-based retrieval, and in contrast with the view that cue-based retrieval is a reanalysis mechanism (Wagers et al., 2009).
Finally, the same experimental results that showed inhibitory interference from the number feature are used for a finer grain evaluation of the retrieval process. Besides Lewis and Vasishth’s (2005) activation-based model, also McElree’s (2000) direct-access model can account for inhibitory interference. These two models assume a cue-based retrieval mechanism to build dependencies, but they are based on different assumptions. I present a computational evaluation of the predictions of these two theories of retrieval. The models were compared by implementing them in a Bayesian hierarchical framework. The evaluation of the models reveals that some aspects of the data fit better under the direct access model than under the activation-based model. However, a simple extension of the activation-based model provides a comparable fit to the direct access model. This serves as a proof of concept showing potential ways to improve the original activation-based model.
In conclusion, this thesis adds to the body of evidence that argues for the use of the general memory system in dependency resolution, and in particular for a cue-based retrieval mechanism. However, it also shows that some of the default assumptions inherited from ACT-R in the activation-based model need to be revised.