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Both the seat of the German government and the capitol of queer German culture, Berlin has been that spatial nexus of politics, sexuality and gender, work and leisure that has enabled the development of multifarious sexual and gender identities. This has caused celebration and consternation among Germans and foreigners alike. Contemporary studies of urban homosexual space cite an erosion of its 'authenticity' when cities market homosexual space in order to attract tourists. My literary analysis shows that Berlin's homosexual male culture and space had already been subject to commoditisation in the Weimar period (1918-1933), when Berliners discovered marketing potential in the French slight la vice allemand [the German vice] - male homosexuality. This article's examination of Weimar Berlin's spatial binary as 'sexy space' and 'sexualised place' in literature by Klaus Mann and Curt Moreck engages with current debates in leisure studies on the gendering and sexing of geography and leisure. Central to this re-evaluation of leisure and tourism in Weimar Berlin is my discussion of flanerie: the figure of the flaneuse indicates that flanerie was not the lone dominion of heterosexual men. In the context of urban leisure and male homosexuality, I argue that Weimar Berlin consistently and successfully negotiated its dual function of sexy space (allowing self-fashioning for homosexual men in Berlin) and sexualised place (voyeurism and sexual exploration for Berlin's newcomers and tourists).
We present novel experimental evidence on the availability and the status of exhaustivity inferences with focus partitioning in German, English, and Hungarian. Results suggest that German and English focus-background clefts and Hungarian focus share important properties, (É. Kiss 1998, 1999; Szabolcsi 1994; Percus 1997; Onea & Beaver 2009). Those constructions are anaphoric devices triggering an existence presupposition. EXH-inferences are not obligatory in such constructions in English, German, or Hungarian, against some previous literature (Percus 1997; Büring & Križ 2013; É. Kiss 1998), but in line with pragmatic analyses of EXH-inferences in clefts (Horn 1981, 2016; Pollard & Yasavul 2016). The cross-linguistic differences in the distribution of EXH-inferences are attributed to properties of the Hungarian number marking system.
In eye-movement control during reading, advanced process-oriented models have been developed to reproduce behavioral data. So far, model complexity and large numbers of model parameters prevented rigorous statistical inference and modeling of interindividual differences. Here we propose a Bayesian approach to both problems for one representative computational model of sentence reading (SWIFT; Engbert et al., Psychological Review, 112, 2005, pp. 777-813). We used experimental data from 36 subjects who read the text in a normal and one of four manipulated text layouts (e.g., mirrored and scrambled letters). The SWIFT model was fitted to subjects and experimental conditions individually to investigate between- subject variability. Based on posterior distributions of model parameters, fixation probabilities and durations are reliably recovered from simulated data and reproduced for withheld empirical data, at both the experimental condition and subject levels. A subsequent statistical analysis of model parameters across reading conditions generates model-driven explanations for observable effects between conditions.
A case of primary progressive ahasia : a 14year follow-up study with neuropathological findings
(1998)
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.
A close call
(2018)
The present study investigated how lexical selection is influenced by the number of semantically related representations (semantic neighbourhood density) and their similarity (semantic distance) to the target in a speeded picture-naming task. Semantic neighbourhood density and similarity as continuous variables were used to assess lexical selection for which competitive and noncompetitive mechanisms have been proposed. Previous studies found mixed effects of semantic neighbourhood variables, leaving this issue unresolved. Here, we demonstrate interference of semantic neighbourhood similarity with less accurate naming responses and a higher likelihood of producing semantic errors and omissions over accurate responses for words with semantically more similar (closer) neighbours. No main effect of semantic neighbourhood density and no interaction between semantic neighbourhood density and similarity was found. We assessed further whether semantic neighbourhood density can affect naming performance if semantic neighbours exceed a certain degree of semantic similarity. Semantic similarity between the target and each neighbour was used to split semantic neighbourhood density into two different density variables: The number of semantically close neighbours versus distant neighbours. The results showed a significant effect of close, but not of distant, semantic neighbourhood density: Naming pictures of targets with more close semantic neighbours led to longer naming latencies, less accurate responses, and a higher likelihood for the production of semantic errors and omissions over accurate responses. The results show that word inherent semantic attributes such as semantic neighbourhood similarity and the number of coactivated close semantic neighbours modulate lexical selection supporting theories of competitive lexical processing.
We present a computational evaluation of three hypotheses about sources of deficit in sentence comprehension in aphasia: slowed processing, intermittent deficiency, and resource reduction. The ACT-R based Lewis and Vasishth (2005) model is used to implement these three proposals. Slowed processing is implemented as slowed execution time of parse steps; intermittent deficiency as increased random noise in activation of elements in memory; and resource reduction as reduced spreading activation. As data, we considered subject vs. object relative sentences, presented in a self-paced listening modality to 56 individuals with aphasia (IWA) and 46 matched controls. The participants heard the sentences and carried out a picture verification task to decide on an interpretation of the sentence. These response accuracies are used to identify the best parameters (for each participant) that correspond to the three hypotheses mentioned above. We show that controls have more tightly clustered (less variable) parameter values than IWA; specifically, compared to controls, among IWA there are more individuals with slow parsing times, high noise, and low spreading activation. We find that (a) individual IWA show differential amounts of deficit along the three dimensions of slowed processing, intermittent deficiency, and resource reduction, (b) overall, there is evidence for all three sources of deficit playing a role, and (c) IWA have a more variable range of parameter values than controls. An important implication is that it may be meaningless to talk about sources of deficit with respect to an abstract verage IWA; the focus should be on the individual's differential degrees of deficit along different dimensions, and on understanding the causes of variability in deficit between participants.
The paper presents a novel approach to explaining word order variation in the early Germanic languages. Initial observations about verb placement as a device marking types of rhetorical relations made on data from Old High German (cf. Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2005) are now reconsidered on a larger scale and compared with evidence from other early Germanic languages. The paper claims that the identification of information-structural domains in a sentence is best achieved by taking into account the interaction between the pragmatic features of discourse referents and properties of discourse organization.
We present a general framework for integrating annotations from different tools and tag sets. When annotating corpora at multiple linguistic levels, annotators may use different expert tools for different phenomena or types of annotation. These tools employ different data models and accompanying approaches to visualization, and they produce different output formats. For the purposes of uniformly processing these outputs, we developed a pivot format called PAULA, along with converters to and from tool formats. Different annotations are not only integrated at the level of data format, but are also joined on the level of conceptual representation. For this purpose, we introduce OLiA, an ontology of linguistic annotations that mediates between alternative tag sets that cover the same class of linguistic phenomena. All components are integrated in the linguistic information system ANNIS : Annotation tool output is converted to the pivot format PAULA and read into a database where the data can be visualized, queried, and evaluated across multiple layers. For cross-tag set querying and statistical evaluation, ANNIS uses the ontology of linguistic annotations. Finally, ANNIS is also tied to a machine learning component for semiautomatic annotation.
A form-function mismatch?
(2019)
In his short paper of 1886, the neogrammarian linguist Delbruck sketches his views on normal language processing and their relevance for the interpretation of some of the symptoms of progressive anomic aphasia. In particular, he discusses proper name impairments, verb and abstract noun superiority and the predominance of semantically related errors. Furthermore, he suggests that part of speech, morphology and word order may be preserved in this condition. This historical document has been lost in oblivion but the original ideas and their relevance for contemporary discussions merit a revival.
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.
Matching participants (as suggested by Hope, 2015) may be one promising option for research on a potential bilingual advantage in executive functions (EF). In this study we first compared performances in three EF-tasks of a naturally heterogeneous sample of monolingual (n = 69, age = 9.0 y) and multilingual children (n = 57, age = 9.3 y). Secondly, we meticulously matched participants pairwise to obtain two highly homogeneous groups to rerun our analysis and investigate a potential bilingual advantage. The initally disadvantaged multilinguals (regarding socioeconomic status and German lexicon size) performed worse in updating and response inhibition, but similarly in interference inhibition. This indicates that superior EF compensate for the detrimental effects of the background variables. After matching children pairwise on age, gender, intelligence, socioeconomic status and German lexicon size, performances became similar except for interference inhibition. Here, an advantage for multilinguals in the form of globally reduced reaction times emerged, indicating a bilingual executive processing advantage.
Among theories of human language comprehension, cue-based memory retrieval has proven to be a useful framework for understanding when and how processing difficulty arises in the resolution of long-distance dependencies. Most previous work in this area has assumed that very general retrieval cues like [+subject] or [+singular] do the work of identifying (and sometimes misidentifying) a retrieval target in order to establish a dependency between words. However, recent work suggests that general, handpicked retrieval cues like these may not be enough to explain illusions of plausibility (Cunnings & Sturt, 2018), which can arise in sentences like The letter next to the porcelain plate shattered. Capturing such retrieval interference effects requires lexically specific features and retrieval cues, but handpicking the features is hard to do in a principled way and greatly increases modeler degrees of freedom. To remedy this, we use well-established word embedding methods for creating distributed lexical feature representations that encode information relevant for retrieval using distributed retrieval cue vectors. We show that the similarity between the feature and cue vectors (a measure of plausibility) predicts total reading times in Cunnings and Sturt's eye-tracking data. The features can easily be plugged into existing parsing models (including cue-based retrieval and self-organized parsing), putting very different models on more equal footing and facilitating future quantitative comparisons.
Children born preterm are at higher risk to develop language deficits. Auditory speech discrimination deficits may be early signs for language developmental problems. The present study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate neural speech discrimination in 15 preterm infants at term-equivalent age compared to 15 full term neonates. The full term group revealed a significantly greater hemodynamic response to forward compared to backward speech within the left hemisphere extending from superior temporal to inferior parietal and middle and inferior frontal areas. In contrast, the preterm group did not show differences in their hemodynamic responses during forward versus backward speech, thus, they did not discriminate speech from nonspeech. Groups differed significantly in their responses to forward speech, whereas they did not differ in their responses to backward speech. The significant differences between groups point to an altered development of the functional network underlying language acquisition in preterm infants as early as in term-equivalent age.
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.
Background: Event-related potentials (ERPs) are increasingly used in cognitive science. With their high temporal resolution, they offer a unique window into cognitive processes and their time course. In this paper, we focus on ERP experiments whose designs involve selecting participants and stimuli amongst many. Recently, Westfall et al. (2017) highlighted the drastic consequences of not considering stimuli as a random variable in fMRI studies with such designs. Most ERP studies in cognitive psychology suffer from the same drawback. New method: We advocate the use of the Quasi-F or Mixed-effects models instead of the classical ANOVA/by-participant F1 statistic to analyze ERP datasets in which the dependent variable is reduced to one measure per trial (e.g., mean amplitude). We combine Quasi-F statistic and cluster mass tests to analyze datasets with multiple measures per trial. Doing so allows us to treat stimulus as a random variable while correcting for multiple comparisons. Results: Simulations show that the use of Quasi-F statistics with cluster mass tests allows maintaining the family wise error rates close to the nominal alpha level of 0.05. Comparison with existing methods: Simulations reveal that the classical ANOVA/F1 approach has an alarming FWER, demonstrating the superiority of models that treat both participant and stimulus as random variables, like the Quasi-F approach. Conclusions: Our simulations question the validity of studies in which stimulus is not treated as a random variable. Failure to change the current standards feeds the replicability crisis.
Accusative Unaccusatives
(2019)
Speech perception requires rapid extraction of the linguistic content from the acoustic signal. The ability to efficiently process rapid changes in auditory information is important for decoding speech and thereby crucial during language acquisition. Investigating functional networks of speech perception in infancy might elucidate neuronal ensembles supporting perceptual abilities that gate language acquisition. Interhemispheric specializations for language have been demonstrated in infants. How these asymmetries are shaped by basic temporal acoustic properties is under debate. We recently provided evidence that newborns process non-linguistic sounds sharing temporal features with language in a differential and lateralized fashion. The present study used the same material while measuring brain responses of 6 and 3 month old infants using simultaneous recordings of electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). NIRS reveals that the lateralization observed in newborns remains constant over the first months of life. While fast acoustic modulations elicit bilateral neuronal activations, slow modulations lead to right-lateralized responses. Additionally, auditory-evoked potentials and oscillatory EEG responses show differential responses for fast and slow modulations indicating a sensitivity for temporal acoustic variations. Oscillatory responses reveal an effect of development, that is, 6 but not 3 month old infants show stronger theta-band desynchronization for slowly modulated sounds. Whether this developmental effect is due to increasing fine-grained perception for spectrotemporal sounds in general remains speculative. Our findings support the notion that a more general specialization for acoustic properties can be considered the basis for lateralization of speech perception. The results show that concurrent assessment of vascular based imaging and electrophysiological responses have great potential in the research on language acquisition.
This paper investigates the predictions of the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis by studying the acquisition of wh-questions in 4- and 5-year-old Akan-speaking children in an experimental approach using an elicited production and an elicited imitation task. Akan has two types of wh-question structures (wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions), which allows an investigation of children’s acquisition of these two question structures and their preferences for one or the other. Our results show that adults prefer to use wh-ex-situ questions over wh-in-situ questions. The results from the children show that both age groups have the two question structures in their linguistic repertoire. However, they differ in their preferences in usage in the elicited production task: while the 5-year-olds preferred the wh-in-situ structure over the wh-ex-situ structure, the 4-year-olds showed a selective preference for the wh-in-situ structure in who-questions. These findings suggest a developmental change in wh-question preferences in Akan-learning children between 4 and 5 years of age with a so far unobserved u-shaped developmental pattern. In the elicited imitation task, all groups showed a strong tendency to maintain the structure of in-situ and ex-situ questions in repeating grammatical questions. When repairing ungrammatical ex-situ questions, structural changes to grammatical in-situ questions were hardly observed but the insertion of missing morphemes while keeping the ex-situ structure. Together, our findings provide only partial support for the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis.
Previous research on young children's knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which revealed that three- to six-year-old children show adult-like comprehension of the prosodic marking of subject and object focus. Our findings thus support the view that production does not precede comprehension in the acquisition of focus. We tested participants speaking English, German, and French. All three languages allow prosodic subject and object focus marking, but use additional syntactic marking to varying degrees (English: dispreferred; German: possible; French preferred). French participants produced fewer subject marked responses than English participants. We found no other cross-linguistic differences. Participants interpreted prosodic focus marking similarly and in an adult-like fashion in all three languages.
Our paper reports an act out task with German 5- and 6-year olds and adults involving doubly-quantified sentences with a universal object and an existential subject. We found that 5- and 6-year olds allow inverse scope in such sentences, while adults do not. Our findings contribute to a growing body of research (e.g. Gualmini et al. 2008; Musolino 2009, etc.) showing that children are more flexible in their scopal considerations than initially proposed by the Isomorphism proposal (Lidz & Musolino 2002; Musolino & Lidz 2006). This result provides support for a theory of German, a “no quantifier raising”-language, in terms of soft violable constraints, or global economy terms (Bobaljik & Wurmbrand 2012), rather than in terms of hard inviolable constraints or rules (Frey 1993). Finally, the results are compatible with Reinhart’s (2004) hypothesis that children do not perform global interface economy considerations due to the increased processing associated with it.
In two experiments, we compared the dynamics of corticospinal excitability when processing visually or linguistically presented tool-oriented hand actions in native speakers and sequential bilinguals. In a third experiment we used the same procedure to test non-motor, low-level stimuli, i.e. scrambled images and pseudo-words.
Stimuli were presented in sequence: pictures (tool + tool-oriented hand action or their scrambled counterpart) and words (tool noun + tool-action verb or pseudo-words). Experiment 1 presented German linguistic stimuli to native speakers, while Experiment 2 presented English stimuli to non-natives. Experiment 3 tested Italian native speakers. Single-pulse trascranial magnetic stimulation (spTMS) was applied to the left motor cortex at five different timings: baseline, 200 ms after tool/noun onset, 150, 350 and 500 ms after hand/verb onset with motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and abductor digiti minimi (ADM) muscles.
We report strong similarities in the dynamics of corticospinal excitability across the visual and linguistic modalities. MEPs' suppression started as early as 150 ms and lasted for the duration of stimulus presentation (500 ms). Moreover, we show that this modulation is absent for stimuli with no motor content. Overall, our study supports the notion of a core, overarching system of action semantics shared by different modalities.
The purpose of this work is to investigate the role of three articulatory parameters (tongue position, jaw position and tongue grooving) in the production of /s/. Six normal speakers' speech was perturbed by a palatal prosthesis. The fricative was recorded acoustically and through electromagnetic articulography in four conditions: (1) unperturbed, (2) perturbed with auditory feedback masked, (3) perturbed with auditory feedback available and (4) perturbed after a 2-week adaptation period. At the end of the adaptation, speakers produced more high-frequency noise while either having a higher jaw position or more grooving of the tongue or both. We discuss the potential clinical implications of the results with regard to the role of jaw height and tongue grooving in the treatment of impaired /s/.
This study describes ME, a patient in the chronic stage after a traumatic brain injury. During an extensive training programme ME tried to regain automaticity in the retrieval of simple multiplication facts. He succeeded in substantially decreasing response latencies in multiplication, reducing the handicap at his job. This improvement generalised to a non-trained operand order, to non-trained problems, and to a non-trained output modality. Moreover, these effects were maintained over at least four months. Interestingly, however, ME's training effects were operation specific: No significant improvement occurred in addition, subtraction, or division. As coloured presentation of multiplication problems proved to be a valuable cue in facilitating the patient's performance, this might turn out to be a useful tool in the rehabilitation of fact retrieval in general
Advocating the inclusion of older adults in digital language learning technology and research
(2021)
Second language speakers often struggle to apply grammatical constraints such as subject-verb agreement. One hypothesis for this difficulty is that it results from problems suppressing syntactically unlicensed constituents in working memory. We investigated which properties of these constituents make them more likely to elicit errors: their grammatical distance to the subject head or their linear distance to the verb. We used double modifier constructions (e.g., the smell of the stables of the farmers), where the errors of native speakers are modulated by the linguistic relationships between the nouns in the subject phrase: second plural nouns, which are syntactically and semantically closer to the subject head, elicit more errors than third plural nouns, which are linearly closer to the verb (2nd-3rd-noun asymmetry). In order to dissociate between grammatical and linear distance, we compared embedded and coordinated modifiers, which were linearly identical but differed in grammatical distance. Using an attraction paradigm, we showed that German native speakers and proficient Russian speakers of German exhibited similar attraction rates and that their errors displayed a 2nd-3rd-noun asymmetry, which was more pronounced in embedded than in coordinated constructions. We suggest that both native and second language learners prioritize linguistic structure over linear distance in their agreement computations.
Previous studies have found that English speakers experience attraction effects when comprehending subject-verb agreement, showing eased processing of ungrammatical sentences that contain a syntactically unlicensed but number-matching noun. In four self-paced reading experiments we examine whether attraction effects also occur in Spanish, a language where agreement morphology is richer and functionally more significant. We find that despite having a richer morphology, Spanish speakers show reliable attraction effects in comprehension, and that these effects are strikingly similar to those previously found in English in their magnitude and distributional profile. Further, we use distributional analyses to argue that cue-based memory retrieval is used as an error-driven mechanism in comprehension. We suggest that cross-linguistic similarities in agreement attraction result from speakers deploying repair or error-driven mechanisms uniformly across languages. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
This study presents results from a cross-modal priming experiment investigating inflected verb forms of German. A group of late learners of German with Russian as their native language (L1) was compared to a control group of German L1 speakers. The experiment showed different priming patterns for the two participant groups. The L1 German data yielded a stem-priming effect for inflected forms involving regular affixation and a partial priming effect for irregular forms irrespective of stem allomorphy. By contrast, the data from the late bilinguals showed reduced priming effects for both regular and irregular forms. We argue that late learners rely more on lexically stored inflected word forms during word recognition and less on morphological parsing than native speakers.
In this paper, we employ an experimental paradigm using insights from the psychology of reasoning to investigate the question whether certain modals generate and draw attention to alternatives. The article extends and builds on the methodology and findings of Mascarenhas & Picat (2019). Based on experimental results, they argue that the English epistemic modal might raises alternatives. We apply the same methodology to the English modal allowed to to test different hypotheses regarding the involvement of alternatives in deontic modality. We find commonalities and differences between the two modals we tested. We discuss theoretical consequences for existing semantic analyses of these modals, and argue that reasoning tasks can serve as a diagnostic tool to discover which natural language expressions involve alternatives.
Alvin A. Liberman
(1999)
The material reported on in this paper is part of a set of experiments in which the role of Information Structure on L2 processing of words is tested. Pitch and duration of 4 sets of experimental material in German and English are measured and analyzed in this paper. The well-known finding that accent boosts duration and pitch is confirmed. Syntactic and lexical means of marking focus, however, do not give the duration and the pitch of a word an extra boost.
Sentences with doubly center-embedded relative clauses in which a verb phrase (VP) is missing are sometimes perceived as grammatical, thus giving rise to an illusion of grammaticality. In this paper, we provide a new account of why missing-VP sentences, which are both complex and ungrammatical, lead to an illusion of grammaticality, the so-called missing-VP effect. We propose that the missing-VP effect in particular, and processing difficulties with multiply center-embedded clauses more generally, are best understood as resulting from interference during cue-based retrieval. When processing a sentence with double center-embedding, a retrieval error due to interference can cause the verb of an embedded clause to be erroneously attached into a higher clause. This can lead to an illusion of grammaticality in the case of missing-VP sentences and to processing complexity in the case of complete sentences with double center-embedding. Evidence for an interference account of the missing-VP effect comes from experiments that have investigated the missing-VP effect in German using a speeded grammaticality judgments procedure. We review this evidence and then present two new experiments that show that the missing-VP effect can be found in German also with less restricting procedures. One experiment was a questionnaire study which required grammaticality judgments from participants without imposing any time constraints. The second experiment used a self-paced reading procedure and did not require any judgments. Both experiments confirm the prior findings of missing-VP effects in German and also show that the missing-VP effect is subject to a primacy effect as known from the memory literature. Based on this evidence, we argue that an account of missing-VP effects in terms of interference during cue-based retrieval is superior to accounts in terms of limited memory resources or in terms of experience with embedded structures.
Sentences with doubly center-embedded relative clauses in which a verb phrase (VP) is missing are sometimes perceived as grammatical, thus giving rise to an illusion of grammaticality. In this paper, we provide a new account of why missing-VP sentences, which are both complex and ungrammatical, lead to an illusion of grammaticality, the so-called missing-VP effect. We propose that the missing-VP effect in particular, and processing difficulties with multiply center-embedded clauses more generally, are best understood as resulting from interference during cue-based retrieval. When processing a sentence with double center-embedding, a retrieval error due to interference can cause the verb of an embedded clause to be erroneously attached into a higher clause. This can lead to an illusion of grammaticality in the case of missing-VP sentences and to processing complexity in the case of complete sentences with double center-embedding. Evidence for an interference account of the missing-VP effect comes from experiments that have investigated the missing-VP effect in German using a speeded grammaticality judgments procedure. We review this evidence and then present two new experiments that show that the missing-VP effect can be found in German also with less restricting procedures. One experiment was a questionnaire study which required grammaticality judgments from participants without imposing any time constraints. The second experiment used a self-paced reading procedure and did not require any judgments. Both experiments confirm the prior findings of missing-VP effects in German and also show that the missing-VP effect is subject to a primacy effect as known from the memory literature. Based on this evidence, we argue that an account of missing-VP effects in terms of interference during cue-based retrieval is superior to accounts in terms of limited memory resources or in terms of experience with embedded structures.
Holmberg (1997, 1999) assumes that Holmberg's generalisation (HG) is derivational, prohibiting Object Shift (OS) across an intervening non-adverbial element at any point in the derivation. Counterexamples to this hypothesis are given in Fox & Pesetsky (2005) which show that remnant VP-topicalisations are possible in Scandinavian as long as the VP-internal order relations are maintained. Extending the empirical basis concerning remnant VP-topicalisations, we argue that HG and the restrictions on object stranding result from the same, more general condition on order preservation. Considering this condition to be violable and to interact with various constraints on movement in an Optimality-theoretic fashion, we suggest an account for various asymmetries in the interaction between remnant VP-topicalisations and both OS and other movement operations (especially subject raising) as to their order preserving characteristics and stranding abilities.
In this paper we report the results of an elicited imitation task on dative case marking in non-canonical double object constructions with 22 German children (3;9-6;8). The aim was to test the proficiency of the children's grammar and to see which strategies they use to produce ditransitive sentences in which the direct object precedes the indirect object. The analysis of the children's utterances/imitations shows that the animacy of the direct object affects the overt dative case marking of the indirect object. Children made more errors repeating dative case marking when the direct object was inanimate, i.e., they produced the accusative case on the indirect object (non-adult-like). When both objects were animate, children correctly produced the dative case on the indirect object. We describe and account for these performance strategies of the children in the framework of Optimality Theory. Assuming that the same universal constraints are at work as in the adult grammar, the difference between adults and children lies in the constraint ranking. We focus on a prominent pattern found in children's performance, which is absent (or rather oppressed) in the corresponding adult performance, and show that one and the same grammar accounts for both (in the sense of "strong continuity"). (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
This article presents several acceptability rating experiments concerned with crossing wh-movement in German multiple questions. Our results show that there is no general superiority effect in German, thus refuting claims to the contrary by Featherston (2005). However, acceptability is reduced when a wh-phrase crosses a wh-subject with which it agrees in animacy. We explain this finding in terms of the availability of different sorting keys for the answers to the multiple questions.
ANNIS
(2004)
In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of our first version of the database "ANNIS" ("ANNotation of Information Structure"). For research based on empirical data, ANNIS provides a uniform environment for storing this data together with its linguistic annotations. A central database promotes standardized annotation, which facilitates interpretation and comparison of the data. ANNIS is used through a standard web browser and offers tier-based visualization of data and annotations, as well as search facilities that allow for cross-level and cross-sentential queries. The paper motivates the design of the system, characterizes its user interface, and provides an initial technical evaluation of ANNIS with respect to data size and query processing.
Apples and oranges
(2021)
Despite scarce empirical evidence, introducing new vocabulary in semantic categories has long been standard in second language teaching. We examined the effect of learning context on encoding, immediate recall and integration of new vocabulary into semantic memory by contrasting categorically related (novel names for familiar concepts blocked by semantic category) and unrelated (mixed semantic categories) learning contexts. Two learning sessions were conducted 24 hours apart, with each participant exposed to both contexts. Subsequently, a test phase examined picture naming, translation and picture-word interference tasks. Compared to the unrelated context, the categorically related context resulted in poorer naming accuracy in the learning phase, slower response latencies at the immediate recall tasks and greater semantic interference in the picture-word interference task (picture naming in L1 with semantically related novel word distractors). We develop a theoretical account of word learning that attributes observed differences to episodic rather than semantic memory.
In successful communication, the literal meaning of linguistic utterances is often enriched by pragmatic inferences. Part of the pragmatic reasoning underlying such inferences has been successfully modeled as Bayesian goal recognition in the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In this paper, we try to model the interpretation of question-answer sequences with narrow focus in the answer in the RSA framework, thereby exploring the effects of domain size and prior probabilities on interpretation. Should narrow focus exhaustivity inferences be actually based on Bayesian inference involving prior probabilities of states, RSA models should predict a dependency of exhaustivity on these factors. We present experimental data that suggest that interlocutors do not act according to the predictions of the RSA model and that exhaustivity is in fact approximately constant across different domain sizes and priors. The results constitute a conceptual challenge for Bayesian accounts of the underlying pragmatic inferences.
Time reference, which has been found to be selectively impaired in agrammatic aphasia, is often interwoven with grammatical aspect. A recent study on Russian aphasia found that time reference and aspect interact: Past reference was less impaired when tested within a perfective aspect context (compared to when tested within an imperfective aspect context), and reference to the non-past was less impaired when tested within an imperfective aspect context (compared to when tested within a perfective aspect context). To explain this pattern, the authors argued that there are prototypical associations between time frames and aspectual values. The present study explores the relationship between time reference and aspect focusing on Greek aphasia and healthy ageing and using a sentence completion task that crosses time reference and aspect. The findings do not support prototypical matches between different time frames and aspectual values. Building on relevant studies, we propose that patterns of performance of healthy or language-impaired speakers on constrained tasks tapping different combinations of time frames with aspectual values should reflect the relative frequency of these combinations in a given language. The analysis of the results at the individual level revealed a double dissociation, which indicates that a given time frame-aspectual value combination may be relatively easy to process for some persons with aphasia but demanding for some others.
Several studies (e.g., Wicha et al., 2003b; DeLong et al., 2005) have shown that readers use information from the sentential context to predict nouns (or some of their features), and that predictability effects can be inferred from the EEG signal in determiners or adjectives appearing before the predicted noun. While these findings provide evidence for the pre-activation proposal, recent replication attempts together with inconsistencies in the results from the literature cast doubt on the robustness of this phenomenon. Our study presents the first attempt to use the effect of gender on predictability in German to study the pre-activation hypothesis, capitalizing on the fact that all German nouns have a gender and that their preceding determiners can show an unambiguous gender marking when the noun phrase has accusative case. Despite having a relatively large sample size (of 120 subjects), both our preregistered and exploratory analyses failed to yield conclusive evidence for or against an effect of pre-activation. The sign of the effect is, however, in the expected direction: the more unexpected the gender of the determiner, the larger the negativity. The recent, inconclusive replication attempts by Nieuwland et al. (2018) and others also show effects with signs in the expected direction. We conducted a Bayesian random-ef-fects meta-analysis using our data and the publicly available data from these recent replication attempts. Our meta-analysis shows a relatively clear but very small effect that is consistent with the pre-activation account and demonstrates a very important advantage of the Bayesian data analysis methodology: we can incrementally accumulate evidence to obtain increasingly precise estimates of the effect of interest.
Argument mining on twitter
(2021)
In the last decade, the field of argument mining has grown notably. However, only relatively few studies have investigated argumentation in social media and specifically on Twitter. Here, we provide the, to our knowledge, first critical in-depth survey of the state of the art in tweet-based argument mining. We discuss approaches to modelling the structure of arguments in the context of tweet corpus annotation, and we review current progress in the task of detecting argument components and their relations in tweets. We also survey the intersection of argument mining and stance detection, before we conclude with an outlook.
Argument-head distance and processing complexity: Explaining both locality and antilocality effects
(2006)
Although proximity between arguments and verbs (locality) is a relatively robust determinant of sentence-processing difficulty (Hawkins 1998, 2001, Gibson 2000), increasing argument-verb distance can also facilitate processing (Konieczny 2000). We present two self-paced reading (SPR) experiments involving Hindi that provide further evidence of antilocality, and a third SPR experiment which suggests that similarity-based interference can attenuate this distance-based facilitation. A unified explanation of interference, locality, and antilocality effects is proposed via an independently motivated theory of activation decay and retrieval interference (Anderson et al. 2004).*
Aspect splits can affect agreement, Case, and even preposition insertion. This paper discusses the functional ‘why’ and the theoretical ‘how’ of aspect splits. Aspect splits are an economical way to mark aspect by preserving or suppressing some independent element in one aspect. In formal terms, they are produced in the same way as coda conditions in phonology, with positional/contextual faithfulness.This approach captures the additive effects of cross-cutting splits. Aspect splits are analyzed here from Hindi, Nepali, Yucatec Maya, Chontal, and Palauan.
This paper presents the results of a novel experimental approach to relative quantifier scope in German that elicits data in an indirect manner. Applying the covered-box method (Huang et al. 2013) to scope phenomena, we show that inverse scope is available to some extent in the free constituent order language German, thereby validating earlier findings on other syntactic configurations in German (Rado & Bott 2018) and empirical claims on other free constituent order languages (Japanese, Russian, Hindi), as well as recent corpus findings in Webelhuth (2020). Moreover, the results of the indirect covered-box experiment replicate findings from an earlier direct-query experiment with comparable target items, in which participants were asked directly about the availability of surface scope and inverse scope readings. The configuration of interest consisted of canonical transitive clauses with deaccented existential subject and universal object QPs, in which the restriction of the universal QP was controlled for by the context.
The attentional bias to negative information enables humans to quickly identify and to respond appropriately to potentially threatening situations. Because of its adaptive function, the enhanced sensitivity to negative information is expected to represent a universal trait, shared by all humans regardless of their cultural background. However, existing research focuses almost exclusively on humans from Western industrialized societies, who are not representative for the human species. Therefore, we compare humans from two distinct cultural contexts: adolescents and children from Germany, a Western industrialized society, and from the not equal Akhoe Hai parallel to om, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers in Namibia. We predicted that both groups show an attentional bias toward negative facial expressions as compared to neutral or positive faces. We used eye-tracking to measure their fixation duration on facial expressions depicting different emotions, including negative (fear, anger), positive (happy), and neutral faces. Both Germans and the not equal Akhoe Hai parallel to om gazed longer at fearful faces, but shorter on angry faces, challenging the notion of a general bias toward negative emotions. For happy faces, fixation durations varied between the two groups, suggesting more flexibility in the response to positive emotions. Our findings emphasize the need for placing research on emotion perception into an evolutionary, cross-cultural comparative framework that considers the adaptive significance of specific emotions, rather than differentiating between positive and negative information, and enables systematic comparisons across participants from diverse cultural backgrounds.
People with the genetic disorder of Williams syndrome (WS) show an anomalous cognitive profile, wherein some purely verbal and social communicative abilities are relatively proficient, while visuo-spatial skills can be extremely impaired. Face processing, while apparently relatively spared among visuo-spatial skills, can show deficits suggesting developmental immaturity. In this context, the exploration of visual and audiovisual speech perception in WS is of interest. A new test based on tokens from a single natural English speaker of the form /ba:/, /va:/, /tha:/, /da:/ and / ga:/, digitally manipulated and presented in unimodal (vision alone, audition alone) and audiovisual conditions, was presented for participants to identify each token. Compared with age-matched controls, WS participants were impaired at visual but not auditory identification, and in audiovisual testing showed correspondingly reduced effects of vision on report of auditory token identity. Audiovisual integration was nevertheless demonstrable in WS. Speech-reading may require skills which do not reach age-appropriate levels in WS, despite their age-appropriate (auditory) phonological abilities.
Argumentation mining is a subfield of Computational Linguistics that aims (primarily) at automatically finding arguments and their structural components in natural language text. We provide a short introduction to this field, intended for an audience with a limited computational background. After explaining the subtasks involved in this problem of deriving the structure of arguments, we describe two other applications that are popular in computational linguistics: sentiment analysis and stance detection. From the linguistic viewpoint, they concern the semantics of evaluation in language. In the final part of the paper, we briefly examine the roles that these two tasks play in argumentation mining, both in current practice, and in possible future systems.
Back from the future
(2019)
Purpose: This study examines the temporal organization of vocalic anticipation in German children from 3 to 7 years of age and adults. The main objective was to test for nonlinear processes in vocalic anticipation, which may result from the interaction between lingual gestural goals for individual vowels and those for their neighbors over time. Method: The technique of ultrasound imaging was employed to record tongue movement at 5 time points throughout short utterances of the form V1#CV2. Vocalic anticipation was examined with generalized additive modeling, an analytical approach allowing for the estimation of both linear and nonlinear influences on anticipatory processes. Conclusions: A developmental transition towards more segmentally-specified coarticulatory organizations seems to occur from kindergarten to primary school to adulthood. In adults, nonlinear anticipatory patterns over time suggest a strong differentiation between the gestural goals for consecutive segments. In children, this differentiation is not yet mature: Vowels show greater prominence over time and seem activated more in phase with those of previous segments relative to adults.
Linear mixed-effects models have increasingly replaced mixed-model analyses of variance for statistical inference in factorial psycholinguistic experiments. Although LMMs have many advantages over ANOVA, like ANOVAs, setting them up for data analysis also requires some care. One simple option, when numerically possible, is to fit the full variance covariance structure of random effects (the maximal model; Barr, Levy, Scheepers & Tily, 2013), presumably to keep Type I error down to the nominal a in the presence of random effects. Although it is true that fitting a model with only random intercepts may lead to higher Type I error, fitting a maximal model also has a cost: it can lead to a significant loss of power. We demonstrate this with simulations and suggest that for typical psychological and psycholinguistic data, higher power is achieved without inflating Type I error rate if a model selection criterion is used to select a random effect structure that is supported by the data. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.
This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS — following Chafe (1976) — within a communicative model of Common Ground(CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. Second, this paper defines and discusses the notions of Focus (as indicating alternatives) and its various uses, Givenness (as indicating that a denotation is already present in the CG), and Topic (as specifying what a statement is about). It also proposes a new notion, Delimitation, which comprises contrastive topics and frame setters, and indicates that the current conversational move does not entirely satisfy the local communicative needs. It also points out that rhetorical structuring partly belongs to IS.
This tutorial analyzes voice onset time (VOT) data from Dongbei (Northeastern) Mandarin Chinese and North American English to demonstrate how Bayesian linear mixed models can be fit using the programming language Stan via the R package brms. Through this case study, we demonstrate some of the advantages of the Bayesian framework: researchers can (i) flexibly define the underlying process that they believe to have generated the data; (ii) obtain direct information regarding the uncertainty about the parameter that relates the data to the theoretical question being studied; and (iii) incorporate prior knowledge into the analysis. Getting started with Bayesian modeling can be challenging, especially when one is trying to model one’s own (often unique) data. It is difficult to see how one can apply general principles described in textbooks to one’s own specific research problem. We address this barrier to using Bayesian methods by providing three detailed examples, with source code to allow easy reproducibility. The examples presented are intended to give the reader a flavor of the process of model-fitting; suggestions for further study are also provided. All data and code are available from: https://osf.io/g4zpv.
Usage-based theories assume that all aspects of language processing are shaped by the distributional properties of the language. The frequency not only of words but also of larger chunks plays a major role in language processing. These theories predict that the frequency of phrases influences the time needed to prepare these phrases for production and their acoustic duration. By contrast, dominant psycholinguistic models of utterance production predict no such effects. In these models, the system keeps track of the frequency of individual words but not of co-occurrences. This study investigates the extent to which the frequency of phrases impacts naming latencies and acoustic duration with a balanced design, where the same words are recombined to build high- and low-frequency phrases. The brain signal of participants is recorded so as to obtain information on the electrophysiological bases and functional locus of frequency effects. Forty-seven participants named pictures using high- and low-frequency adjective-noun phrases. Naming latencies were shorter for high-frequency than low-frequency phrases. There was no evidence that phrase frequency impacted acoustic duration. The electrophysiological signal differed between high- and low-frequency phrases in time windows that do not overlap with conceptualization or articulation processes. These findings suggest that phrase frequency influences the preparation of phrases for production, irrespective of the lexical properties of the constituents, and that this effect originates at least partly when speakers access and encode linguistic representations. Moreover, this study provides information on how the brain signal recorded during the preparation of utterances changes with the frequency of word combinations.
Individuals differ in the time needed to name a picture. This contribution asks whether this inter-individual variability emerges in earlier stages of word production (e.g. lexical selection) or later stages (e.g. articulation) and examines the consequences of this variability for EEG group results. We measured participants' (N = 45) naming latencies and continuous EEG in a picture-word interference task and naming latencies in a delayed naming task. Inter-individual variability in naming latencies in immediate naming (in contrast with inter-item variability) was not larger than the variability in the delayed task, suggesting that some variability in immediate naming originates in later stages of word production. EEG data complemented this interpretation: Differences between relatively fast vs. slow speakers emerged in response-aligned analyses in a time window close to the vocal response. We additionally present a method to assess the generalisability of the timing of effects across participants based on random sampling.
Coherence relations are typically taken to link two clauses or larger units and to be signaled at the text surface by conjunctions and certain adverbials. Relations, however, also can hold within clauses, indicated by prepositions like despite, due to, or in case of, when these have an internal argument denoting an eventuality. Although these prepositions act as reliable cues to indicate a specific relation, others are lexically more neutral. We investigated this situation for the German preposition bei, which turns out to be highly ambiguous. We demonstrate the range of readings in a corpus study, proposing 6 more specific prepositions as a comprehensive substitution set. All these uses of bei share a common kernel meaning, which is missed by the standard accounts that assume lexical polysemy. We examine the range of coherence relations that can be signaled by bei and provide some factors here supporting the disambiguation task in a framework of discourse interpretation
This paper presents a combination of R packages-user contributed toolkits written in a common core programming language-to facilitate the humanistic investigation of digitised, text-based corpora.Our survey of text analysis packages includes those of our own creation (cleanNLP and fasttextM) as well as packages built by other research groups (stringi, readtext, hyphenatr, quanteda, and hunspell). By operating on generic object types, these packages unite research innovations in corpus linguistics, natural language processing, machine learning, statistics, and digital humanities. We begin by extrapolating on the theoretical benefits of R as an elaborate gluing language for bringing together several areas of expertise and compare it to linguistic concordancers and other tool-based approaches to text analysis in the digital humanities. We then showcase the practical benefits of an ecosystem by illustrating how R packages have been integrated into a digital humanities project. Throughout, the focus is on moving beyond the bag-of-words, lexical frequency model by incorporating linguistically-driven analyses in research.
Bienenfresserortungsversuch
(2019)
Perceptual narrowing in the domain of face perception typically begins to reduce infants' sensitivity to differences distinguishing other-race faces from approximately 6 months of age. The present study investigated whether it is possible to re-sensitize Caucasian 12-month-old infants to other-race Asian faces through statistical learning by familiarizing them with different statistical distributions of these faces. The familiarization faces were created by generating a morphed continuum from one Asian face identity to another. In the unimodal condition, infants were familiarized with a frequency distribution wherein they saw the midpoint face of the morphed continuum the most frequently. In the bimodal condition, infants were familiarized with a frequency distribution wherein they saw faces closer to the endpoints of the morphed continuum the most frequently. After familiarization, infants were tested on their discrimination of the two original Asian faces. The infants' looking times during the test indicated that infants in the bimodal condition could discriminate between the two faces, while infants in the unimodal condition could not. These findings therefore suggest that 12-month-old Caucasian infants could be re-sensitized to Asian faces by familiarizing them with a bimodal frequency distribution of such faces.
Pronouns can sometimes covary with a non c-commanding quantifier phrase (QP). To obtain such 'telescoping' readings, a semantic representation must be computed in which the QP's semantic scope extends beyond its surface scope. Non-native speakers have been claimed to have more difficulty than native speakers deriving such non-isomorphic syntax-semantics mappings, but evidence from processing studies is scarce. We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring experiment and an offline questionnaire investigating whether native and non-native speakers of German can link personal pronouns to non c-commanding QPs inside relative clauses. Our results show that both participant groups were able to obtain telescoping readings offline, but only the native speakers showed evidence of forming telescoping dependencies during incremental parsing. During processing the non-native speakers focused on a discourse-prominent, non-quantified alternative antecedent instead. The observed group differences indicate that non-native comprehenders have more difficulty than native comprehenders computing scope-shifted representations in real time.
The current study examines the neural correlates of 8-to-12-year-old children and adults producing inflected word forms, specifically regular vs. irregular past-tense forms in English, using a silent production paradigm. ERPs were time-locked to a visual cue for silent production of either a regular or irregular past-tense form or a 3rd person singular present tense form of a given verb (e.g., walked/sang vs. walks/sings). Subsequently, another visual stimulus cued participants for an overt vocalization of their response. ERP results for the adult group revealed a negativity 300-450 ms after the silent-production cue for regular compared to irregular past-tense forms. There was no difference in the present form condition. Children's brain potentials revealed developmental changes, with the older children demonstrating more adult-like ERP responses than the younger ones. We interpret the observed ERP responses as reflecting combinatorial processing involved in regular (but not irregular) past-tense formation.
Brain potentials for derivational morphology an ERP study of deadjectival nominalizations in Spanish
(2012)
This study investigates brain potentials to derived word forms in Spanish. Two experiments were performed on derived nominals that differ in terms of their productivity and semantic properties but are otherwise similar, an acceptability judgment task and a reading experiment using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in which correctly and incorrectly formed derived words were presented in sentence contexts. The first experiment indicated productivity differences between the different nominalization processes in Spanish. The second experiment yielded a pattern of ERP responses that differed from both the familiar lexical-semantic and grammatical ERP effects. Violations of derivational morphology elicited an increased N400 component plus a late positivity (P600), unlike gender-agreement violations, which produced the biphasic LAN/P600 ERP pattern known from previous studies of morpho-syntactic violations. We conclude that the recognition of derived word forms engages both word-level (lexical-semantic) and decompositional (morpheme-based) processes.
Branching constraints
(2009)
Rejecting approaches with a directionality parameter, mainstream minimalism has adopted the notion of strict (or unidirectional) branching. Within optimality theory however, constraints have recently been proposed that presuppose that the branching direction scheme is language specific. I show that a syntactic analysis of Chechen word order and relative clauses using strict branching and movement triggered by feature checking seems very unlikely, whereas a directionality approach works well. I argue in favor of a mixed directionality approach for Chechen, where the branching direction scheme depends on the phrase type. This observation leads to the introduction of context variants of existing markedness constraints, in order to describe the branching processes in terms of optimality theory. The paper discusses how and where the optimality theory selection of the branching directions can be implemented within a minimalist derivation.
Given the contemporary trend to modular NLP architectures and multiple annotation frameworks, the existence of concurrent tokenizations of the same text represents a pervasive problem in everyday's NLP practice and poses a non-trivial theoretical problem to the integration of linguistic annotations and their interpretability in general. This paper describes a solution for integrating different tokenizations using a standoff XML format, and discusses the consequences from a corpus-linguistic perspective.
In the recent literature there is a hypothesis that the human parser uses number and case information in different ways to resolve an initially incorrect case assignment. This paper investigates what role morphological case information plays during the parser’s detection of an ungrammaticality or its recognition that a reanalysis is necessary. First, we compare double nominative with double accusative ungrammaticalities in a word by word, speeded grammaticality task and in this way show that only double nominatives lead to a so-called ”illusion of grammaticality” (a low rate of ungrammaticality detection). This illusion was found to disappear when the second argument was realized by a pronoun rather than by a full definite determiner phrase, i.e. when the saliency of the second argument was increased. Thus, the accuracy in recognizing an ungrammaticality induced by the case feature of the second argument is dependent on the type of this argument. Furthermore, we found that the accuracy in detecting such case ungrammaticalities is distance sensitive insofar as a shorter distance leads to a higher accuracy. The results are taken as support for an ”expectationdriven” parse strategy in which the way the parser uses the information of a current input item depends on the expectation resulting from the parse carried out so far. By contrast, ”input-driven” parse strategies, such as the diagnosis model (Fodor & Inoue, 1999) are unable to explain the data presented here.
Encountering a cataphoric pronoun triggers a search for a suitable referent. Previous research indicates that this search is constrained by binding Condition C, which prohibits coreference between a cataphoric pronoun and a referential expression within its c-command domain. We report the results from a series of eye-movement monitoring and questionnaire experiments investigating cataphoric pronoun resolution in German. Given earlier findings suggesting that the application of structure-sensitive constraints on reference resolution may be delayed in non-native language processing, we tested both native and proficient non-native speakers of German. Our results show that cataphoric pronouns trigger an active search in both native and non-native comprehenders. Whilst both participant groups demonstrated awareness of Condition C in an offline task, we found Condition C effects to be restricted to later processing measures during online reading. This indicates that during natural reading, Condition C applies as a relatively late filter on potential coreference assignments.
There is increasing interest ill understanding the neural systems that mediate analogical thinking, which is essential for learning and fluid intelligence. The aim of the present study was to shed light on the cerebral correlates of geometric analogical processing and on training-induced changes at the behavioral and brain level. In healthy participants a bilateral fronto-parietal network was engaged in processing geometric analogies and showed greater blood oxygenation dependent (BOLD) signals as resource demands increased. This network, as well as fusiform and subcortical brain regions, additionally showed training-induced decreases in the BOLD signal over time. The general finding that brain regions were modulated by the amount of resources demanded by the task, and/or by the reduction of allocated resources due to short term training, reflects increased efficiency - in terms of more focal and more specialized brain activation - to more economically process the geometric analogies. Our data indicate a rapid adaptation of the cognitive system which is efficiently modulated by short term training based on a positive correlation of resource demands and brain activation.
Background: In addition to the canonical subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, German also allows for non-canonical order (OVS), and the case-marking system supports thematic role interpretation. Previous eye-tracking studies (Kamide et al., 2003; Knoeferle, 2007) have shown that unambiguous case information in non-canonical sentences is processed incrementally. For individuals with agrammatic aphasia, comprehension of non-canonical sentences is at chance level (Burchert et al., 2003). The trace deletion hypothesis (Grodzinsky 1995, 2000) claims that this is due to structural impairments in syntactic representations, which force the individual with aphasia (IWA) to apply a guessing strategy. However, recent studies investigating online sentence processing in aphasia (Caplan et al., 2007; Dickey et al., 2007) found that divergences exist in IWAs' sentence-processing routines depending on whether they comprehended non-canonical sentences correctly or not, pointing rather to a processing deficit explanation. Aims: The aim of the current study was to investigate agrammatic IWAs' online and offline sentence comprehension simultaneously in order to reveal what online sentence-processing strategies they rely on and how these differ from controls' processing routines. We further asked whether IWAs' offline chance performance for non-canonical sentences does indeed result from guessing. Methods Procedures: We used the visual-world paradigm and measured eye movements (as an index of online sentence processing) of controls (N = 8) and individuals with aphasia (N = 7) during a sentence-picture matching task. Additional offline measures were accuracy and reaction times. Outcomes Results: While the offline accuracy results corresponded to the pattern predicted by the TDH, IWAs' eye movements revealed systematic differences depending on the response accuracy. Conclusions: These findings constitute evidence against attributing IWAs' chance performance for non-canonical structures to mere guessing. Instead, our results support processing deficit explanations and characterise the agrammatic parser as deterministic and inefficient: it is slowed down, affected by intermittent deficiencies in performing syntactic operations, and fails to compute reanalysis even when one is detected.
We discuss an intervention programme for kindergarten and school teachers' continuing education in Germany that targets biases against language outside a perceived monolingual ‘standard’ and its speakers. The programme combines anti-bias methods relating to linguistic diversity with objectives of raising critical language awareness. Evaluation through teachers' workshops in Berlin and Brandenburg points to positive and enduring attitudinal changes in participants, but not in control groups that did not attend workshops, and effects were independent of personal variables gender and teaching subject and only weakly associated with age. We relate these effects to such programme features as indirect and inclusive methods that foster active engagement, and the combination of ‘safer’ topics targeting attitudes towards linguistic structures with more challenging ones dealing with the discrimination of speakers.
Child characteristics, family factors, and preschool factors are all found to affect the rate of bilingual children's vocabulary development in heritage language (HL). However, what remains unknown is the relative importance of these three sets of factors in HL vocabulary growth. The current study explored the complex issue with 457 Singaporean preschool children who are speaking either Mandarin, Malay, or Tamil as their HL. A series of internal factors (e.g., non-verbal intelligence) and external factors (e.g., maternal educational level) were used to predict children's HL vocabulary growth over a year at preschool with linear mixed effects models. The results demonstrated that external factors (i.e., family and preschool factors) are relatively more important than child characteristics in enhancing bilingual children's HL vocabulary growth. Specifically, children's language input quantity (i.e., home language dominance), input quality (e.g., number of books in HL), and HL input quantity at school (i.e., the time between two waves of tests at preschool) predict the participants' HL vocabulary growth, with initial vocabulary controlled. The relative importance of external factors in bilingual children's HL vocabulary development is attributed to the general bilingual setting in Singapore, where HL is taken as a subject to learn at preschool and children have fairly limited exposure to HL in general. The limited amount of input might not suffice to trigger the full expression of internal resources. Our findings suggest the crucial roles that caregivers and preschools play in early HL education, and the necessity of more parental involvement in early HL learning in particular.
This study addresses the question of whether and how growing up with more than one language shapes a child's language impairment. Our focus is on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual (Turkish-German) children. We specifically investigated a range of phenomena related to the so-called CP (Complementizer Phrase) in German, the hierarchically highest layer of syntactic clause structure, which has been argued to be particularly affected in children with SLI. Spontaneous speech data were examined from bilingual children with SLI in comparison to two comparison groups: (i) typically-developing bilingual children, (ii) monolingual children with SLI. We found that despite persistent difficulty with subject-verb agreement, the two groups of children with SLI did not show any impairment of the CP-domain. We conclude that while subject-verb agreement is a suitable linguistic marker of SLI in German-speaking children, for both monolingual and bilingual ones, 'vulnerability of the CP-domain' is not.
In a preferential looking paradigm, we studied how children's looking behavior and pupillary response were modulated by the degree of phonological mismatch between the correct label of a target referent and its manipulated form. We manipulated degree of mismatch by introducing one or more featural changes to the target label. Both looking behavior and pupillary response were sensitive to degree of mismatch, corroborating previous studies that found differential responses in one or the other measure. Using time-course analyses, we present for the first time results demonstrating full separability among conditions (detecting difference not only between one vs. more, but also between two and three featural changes). Furthermore, the correct labels and small featural changes were associated with stable target preference, while large featural changes were associated with oscillating looking behavior, suggesting significant shifts in looking preference over time. These findings further support and extend the notion that early words are represented in great detail, containing subphonemic information.
Newspaper text can be broadly divided in the classes ‘opinion’ (editorials, commentary, letters to the editor) and ‘neutral’ (reports). We describe a classification system for performing this separation, which uses a set of linguistically motivated features. Working with various English newspaper corpora, we demonstrate that it significantly outperforms bag-of-lemma and PoS-tag models. We conclude that the linguistic features constitute the best method for achieving robustness against change of newspaper or domain.
Bilingual speakers are faced with the problem to keep their languages apart, but do so with interindividually varying success. Cognitive control abilities might be an important factor to explain such interindividual differences. Here we compare two late, balanced and highly proficient bilingual groups (mean age 24 years, L1 Russian, L2 German) which were established according to their language control abilities on a bilingual picture-naming task. One group had difficulties to remain in the instructed target language and switched unintentionally to the non-target language ("switchers"), whereas the other group rarely switched unintentionally ("non-switchers"). This group-specific behavior could not be explained by language background, socio-cultural, or demographic variables. Rather, the non-switchers also demonstrated a faster and better performance on four cognitive control tests (Tower of Hanoi, Ruff Figural Fluency Test, Divided Attention, Go/Nogo). Here, we focus on two additional executive function tasks, theWisconsin Card SortingTest (WCST) and the Flanker task requiring conflict monitoring and conflict resolution. Non-switchers outperformed switchers with regard to speed and accuracy, and were better at finding and applying the correct rules in the WCST. Similarly, in the Flanker task non-switchers performed faster and better on conflict trials and had a higher correction rate following an error. Event-related potential recordings furthermore revealed a smaller error-related negativity in the non-switchers, taken as evidence for a more efficient self-monitoring system. We conclude that bilingual language performance, in particular switching behavior, is related to performance on cognitive control tasks. Better cognitive control, including conflict monitoring, results in decreased unintentional switching.
Comparisons of equality with German so ... wie, and the relationship between degrees and properties
(2021)
We present a compositionally transparent, unified semantic analysis of two kinds of so ... wie-equative constructions in German, namely degree equatives and property equatives in the domain of individuals or events. Unlike in English and many other European languages (Haspelmath & Buchholz 1998, Rett 2013), both equative types in German feature the parameter marker so, suggesting a unified analysis. We show that the parallel formal expression of German degree and property equatives is accompanied by a parallel syntactic distribution (in predicative, attributive, and adverbial position), and by identical semantic properties: Both equative types allow for scope ambiguities, show negative island effects out of context, and license the negative polarity item uberhaupt 'at all' in the complement clause. As the same properties are also shared by German comparatives, we adopt the influential quantificational analysis of comparatives in von Stechow (1984ab), Heim (1985, 2001, 2007), and Beck (2011), and treat both German equative types in a uniform manner as expressing universal quantification over sets of degrees or over sets of properties (of individuals or events). Conceptually, the uniform marking of degree-related and property-related meanings is expected given that the abstract semantic category degree (type ) can be reconstructed in terms of equivalence classes, i.e., ontologically simpler sets of individuals (type ) or events (type ). These are found in any language, showing that whether or not a language makes explicit reference to degrees (by means of gradable adjectives, degree question words, degree-only equatives) does not follow on general conceptual or semantic grounds, but is determined by the grammar of that language.
Reflecting in written form on one's teaching enactments has been considered a facilitator for teachers' professional growth in university-based preservice teacher education. Writing a structured reflection can be facilitated through external feedback. However, researchers noted that feedback in preservice teacher education often relies on holistic, rather than more content-based, analytic feedback because educators oftentimes lack resources (e.g., time) to provide more analytic feedback. To overcome this impediment to feedback for written reflection, advances in computer technology can be of use. Hence, this study sought to utilize techniques of natural language processing and machine learning to train a computer-based classifier that classifies preservice physics teachers' written reflections on their teaching enactments in a German university teacher education program. To do so, a reflection model was adapted to physics education. It was then tested to what extent the computer-based classifier could accurately classify the elements of the reflection model in segments of preservice physics teachers' written reflections. Multinomial logistic regression using word count as a predictor was found to yield acceptable average human-computer agreement (F1-score on held-out test dataset of 0.56) so that it might fuel further development towards an automated feedback tool that supplements existing holistic feedback for written reflections with data-based, analytic feedback.
In recent experimental work, arguments for or against Condition C reconstruction in A'-movement have been based on low/high availability of coreference in sentences with and without A'-movement. We argue that this reasoning is problematic: It involves arbitrary thresholds, and the results are potentially confounded by the different surface orders of the compared structures and non-syntactic factors. We present three experiments with designs that do not require defining thresholds of 'low' or 'high' coreference values. Instead, we focus on grammatical contrasts (wh-movement vs. relativization, subject vs. object wh-movement) and aim to identify and reduce confounds. The results show that reconstruction for A'-movement of DPs is not very robust in German, contra previous findings. Our results are compatible with the view that the surface order and non-syntactic factors (e.g. plausibility, referential accessibility of an R-expression) heavily influence coreference possibilities. Thus, the data argue against a theory that includes both reconstruction and a hard Condition C constraint. There is a residual contrast between sentences with subject/object movement, which is compatible with an account without reconstruction (and an additional non-syntactic factor) or an account with reconstruction (and a soft Condition C constraint).
Connective-Lex
(2019)
In this paper, we present a tangible outcome of the TextLink network: a joint online database project displaying and linking existing and newly-created lexicons of discourse connectives in multiple languages. We discuss the definition and demarcation of the class of connectives that should be included in such a resource, and present the syntactic, semantic/pragmatic, and lexicographic information we collected. Further, the technical implementation of the database and the search functionality are presented. We discuss how the multilingual integration of several connective lexicons provides added value for linguistic researchers and other users interested in connectives, by allowing crosslinguistic comparison and a direct linking between discourse relational devices in different languages. Finally, we provide pointers for possible future extensions both in breadth (i.e., by adding lexicons for additional languages) and depth (by extending the information provided for each connective item and by strengthening the crosslinguistic links).
Studies on French adults using a written lexical decision task with masked priming, in which targets were more primed by consonant- (jalu-JOLI) than vowel-related (vobi-JOLI) primes, support the proposal that consonants have more weight than vowels in lexical processing.
This study examines the phonological and/or lexical nature of this consonant bias
(C-bias), using a sandwich priming task in which a brief presentation of the target
(pre-prime) precedes the prime-target sequence, a manipulation blocking lexical neighbourhood effects.
Results from three experiments (varying pre-prime/prime durations) show consistent
C-priming and no significant V-priming at earlier and later processing stages (50 or 66 ms primes).
Yet, a joint analysis reveals a small V-priming, while confirming a significant consonant advantage.
This demonstrates the contribution of the phonological level to the C-bias.
Second, differences in performance comparing the classic versus sandwich priming task also establish a contribution of lexical neighbourhood inhibition effects to the C-bias.