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This article examines two so-far-understudied verb doubling constructions in Mandarin Chinese, viz., verb doubling clefts and verb doubling lianaEuro broken vertical bar dou. We show that these constructions have the same internal syntax as regular clefts and lianaEuro broken vertical bar dou sentences, the doubling effect being epiphenomenal; therefore, we classify them as subtypes of the general cleft and lianaEuro broken vertical bar dou constructions, respectively, rather than as independent constructions. Additionally, we also show that, as in many other languages with comparable constructions, the two instances of the verb are part of a single movement chain, which has the peculiarity of allowing Spell-Out of more than one link.
Eye movement data have proven to be very useful for investigating human sentence processing. Eyetracking research has addressed a wide range of questions, such as recovery mechanisms following garden-pathing, the timing of processes driving comprehension, the role of anticipation and expectation in parsing, the role of semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic information, and so on. However, there are some limitations regarding the inferences that can be made on the basis of eye movements. One relates to the nontrivial interaction between parsing and the eye movement control system which complicates the interpretation of eye movement data. Detailed computational models that integrate parsing with eye movement control theories have the potential to unpack the complexity of eye movement data and can therefore aid in the interpretation of eye movements. Another limitation is the difficulty of capturing spatiotemporal patterns in eye movements using the traditional word-based eyetracking measures. Recent research has demonstrated the relevance of these patterns and has shown how they can be analyzed. In this review, we focus on reading, and present examples demonstrating how eye movement data reveal what events unfold when the parser runs into difficulty, and how the parsing system interacts with eye movement control. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:125134. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1209 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
On the Role of Phonetic Motivation and Frequency in the Acquisition of Alternations
German nouns may alternate in two ways: a final word-final voiceless obstruent in the singular may correspond to a voiced one in the plural and a back vowel in the singular may correspond to a front one in the plural. We investigate the role of phonetic motivation and frequency in the acquisition of these alternations. The voicing alternation has a phonetic motivation, but the vowel alternation does not. On the basis of two corpus studies, we conclude that both alternations occur with equal frequency in the ambient language. In two production experiments, one with 5-year-olds and one with adults, we asked both populations to form plurals for given singular words and nonces. The children produce more voicing alternations in nonces than adults and fewer vowel alternations than adults. We conclude that children rely more on phonetic motivation than adults.
In order to re-evaluate the ongoing debate about so-called creole exceptionalism, parallels and continuities from historical texts are shown in a line of argumentation that can be found both in works from the 19th century and from today. Mainly, the influential study of Mauritian Creole by Charles Baissac (1880) exhibits considerable similarities with today's exceptionalist positions. Persisting arguments such as the idea of creoles as "simple", "young" and "natural" languages are (and were) to show the difference of creoles from other languages. Creolists argue that evidence of creoles as a distinct class provides support for the relevance and independence of creolistics as a discipline. Comparing contemporary and historical sources can shed new light on the epistemological heritage of the field.
Three eye movement experiments investigated the interaction between contextual and lexical focus cues during reading. Context was used to focus on either the indirect or direct object of a double object construction, which was followed by a remnant continuation that formed either a congruous or incongruous contrast with the contextually focused object. Experiment 1 demonstrated that remnants were more difficult to process when incongruous with the contextually focused constituent, indicating that context was effective in specifying focus. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated the interaction between context and lexical focus arising from the particle only which specifies focus on the subsequent adjacent element. When only preceded both objects (Experiment 2), the conflict between lexical and contextual focus cues disrupted processing of the remnant element and was resolved in favour of the contextually focused element. However, when only was placed between both objects (Experiment 3), cue-conflict disrupted processing earlier in the sentence but did not appear to be fully resolved during on-line sentence processing. These findings reveal that the interplay between contextual and lexical cues to focus is important for establishing focus structure during on-line sentence processing.
Language processing changes with the knowledge and use of two languages. The advantage of being bilingual comes at the expense of increased processing demands and processing costs. I suggest considering bilingual complexity including these demands and costs. The proposed model claims effortless monolingual processing. By integrating individual and situational variability, the model would lose its idealistic touch, even for monolinguals.
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.
Much previous experimental research on morphological processing has focused on surface and meaning-level properties of morphologically complex words, without paying much attention to the morphological differences between inflectional and derivational processes. Realization-based theories of morphology, for example, assume specific morpholexical representations for derived words that distinguish them from the products of inflectional or paradigmatic processes. The present study reports results from a series of masked priming experiments investigating the processing of inflectional and derivational phenomena in native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers in a non-Indo-European language, Turkish. We specifically compared regular (Aorist) verb inflection with deadjectival nominalization, both of which are highly frequent, productive and transparent in Turkish. The experiments demonstrated different priming patterns for inflection and derivation, specifically within the L2 group. Implications of these findings are discussed both for accounts of L2 morphological processing and for the controversial linguistic distinction between inflection and derivation.
Multitalker situations confront listeners with a plethora of competing auditory inputs, and hence require selective attention to relevant information, especially when the perceptual saliency of distracting inputs is high. This study augmented the classical forced-attention dichotic listening paradigm by adding an interaural intensity manipulation to investigate developmental differences in the interplay between perceptual saliency and attentional control during auditory processing between early and middle childhood. We found that older children were able to flexibly focus on instructed auditory inputs from either the right or the left ear, overcoming the effects of perceptual saliency. In contrast, younger children implemented their attentional focus less efficiently. Direct comparisons of the present data with data from a recently published study of younger and older adults from our group suggest that younger children and older adults show similar levels of performance. Critically, follow-up comparisons revealed that younger children's performance restrictions reflect difficulties in attentional control only, whereas older adults' performance deficits also reflect an exaggerated reliance on perceptual saliency. We conclude that auditory attentional control improves considerably from middle to late childhood and that auditory attention deficits in healthy aging cannot be reduced to a simple reversal of child developmental improvements.
This paper provides a formal analysis of the grammatical encoding of temporal information in Hausa (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic), thereby contributing to the recent debate on temporality in languages without overt tense morphology. By testing the hypothesis of covert tense against recently obtained empirical data, the study yields the result that Hausa is tenseless and that temporal reference is pragmatically inferred from aspectual, modal and contextual information. The second part of the paper addresses the coding of future in particular. It is shown that future time reference in Hausa is realized as a combination of a modal operator and a Prospective aspect marker, involving the modal meaning components of intention and prediction as well as event time shifting. The discussion relates directly to recent approaches to other seemingly tenseless languages such as St'at'imcets (Matthewson, Linguist Philos 29:673-713, 2006) or Paraguayan Guarani (Tonhauser, Linguist Philos 34:257-303, 2011b) and provides further evidence for the suggested analyses of the future markers in these languages.
A general fact about language is that subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. Recently, several self-paced reading studies have presented surprising evidence that object relatives in Chinese are easier to process than subject relatives. We carried out three self-paced reading experiments that attempted to replicate these results. Two of our three studies found a subject-relative preference, and the third study found an object-relative advantage. Using a random effects bayesian meta-analysis of fifteen studies (including our own), we show that the overall current evidence for the subject-relative advantage is quite strong (approximate posterior probability of a subject-relative advantage given the data: 78-80%). We argue that retrieval/integration based accounts would have difficulty explaining all three experimental results. These findings are important because they narrow the theoretical space by limiting the role of an important class of explanation-retrieval/integration cost-at least for relative clause processing in Chinese.
Response inhibition is an attention function which develops relatively early during childhood. Behavioral data suggest that by the age of 3, children master the basic task requirements for the assessment of response inhibition but performance improves substantially until the age of 7. The neuronal mechanisms underlying these developmental processes, however, are not well understood. In this study, we examined brain activation patterns and behavioral performance of children aged between 4 and 6 years compared to adults by applying a go/no-go paradigm during near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) brain imaging. We furthermore applied task-independent functional connectivity measures to the imaging data to identify maturation of intrinsic neural functional networks. We found a significant group x condition related interaction in terms of inhibition-related reduced right fronto-parietal activation in children compared to adults. In contrast, motor-related activation did not differ between age groups. Functional connectivity analysis revealed that in the children's group, short-range coherence within frontal areas was stronger, and long-range coherence between frontal and parietal areas was weaker, compared to adults. Our findings show that in children aged from 4 to 6 years fronto-parietal brain maturation plays a crucial part in the cognitive development of response inhibition.
Perceptual attunement to one's native language results in language-specific processing of speech sounds. This includes stress cues, instantiated by differences in intensity, pitch, and duration. The present study investigates the effects of linguistic experience on the perception of these cues by studying the Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL), which states that listeners group sounds trochaically (strong-weak) if the sounds vary in loudness or pitch and iambically (weak-strong) if they vary in duration. Participants were native listeners either of French or German; this comparison was chosen because French adults have been shown to be less sensitive than speakers of German and other languages to word-level stress, which is communicated by variation in cues such as intensity, fundamental frequency (F0), or duration. In experiment 1, participants listened to sequences of co-articulated syllables varying in either intensity or duration. The German participants were more consistent in their grouping than the French for both cues. Experiment 2 was identical to experiment 1 except that intensity variation was replaced by pitch variation. German participants again showed more consistency for both cues, and French participants showed especially inconsistent grouping for the pitch-varied sequences. These experiments show that the perception of linguistic rhythm is strongly influenced by linguistic experience.
The purpose of this study is to examine and compare the amount of inter-speaker variability in the articulation of monozygotic twin pairs (MZ), dizygotic twin pairs (DZ), and pairs of unrelated twins with the goal of examining in greater depth the influence of physiology on articulation. Physiological parameters are assumed to be very similar in MZ twin pairs in contrast to DZ twin pairs or unrelated speakers, and it is hypothesized that the speaker specific shape of articulatory looping trajectories of the tongue is at least partly dependent on biomechanical properties and the speaker's individual physiology. By means of electromagnetic articulography (EMA), inter-speaker variability in the looping trajectories of the tongue back during /VCV/ sequences is analyzed. Results reveal similar looping patterns within MZ twin pairs but in DZ pairs differences in the shape of the loop, the direction of the upward and downward movement, and the amount of horizontal sliding movement at the palate are found.
The PRO-wh connection in modal existential wh-constructions an argument in favor of semantic control
(2013)
Recent discussion of obligatory control in the literature mostly concentrates on the issue of which syntactic module (movement, agreement, etc.) is responsible for the establishment of the control relation. This paper looks at the issue of control from a higher order perspective. Abandoning the presupposition that control constituents denote propositions and that, therefore, control must be syntactic, I deliver an argument in favor of the property-type analysis of control constituents and, by transitivity, for a semantic resolution of the control relation. The argument comes from modal existential wh-constructions and in particular from a strong parallelism between obligatorily controlled PRO and wh-expressions. It is revealed that PRO and wh-words form a natural class, to the exclusion of all other types of nominal expressions. This is then turned into an argument of treating PRO (and wh-words) essentially as a logical lambda-operator, naturally leading to the property theory of control. In addition, the article contributes to our understanding of the syntax, semantics, and typology of modal existential wh-constructions. It is argued that at least one type of these constructions, what I call "control MECs", is embedded (minimally) by a complex predicate BE+FOR which expresses the state of availability (BE) which makes it possible for someone to profit (FOR) from the event characterized by the modal existential wh-construction.
Many previous studies have shown that the human language processor is capable of rapidly integrating information from different sources during reading or listening. Yet, little is known about how this ability develops from child to adulthood. To gain insight into how children (in comparison to adults) handle different kinds of linguistic information during on-line language comprehension, the current study investigates a well-known morphological phenomenon that is subject to both structural and semantic constraints, the plurals-in-compounds effect, i.e. the dislike of plural (specifically regular plural) modifiers inside compounds (e.g. rats eater). We examined 96 seven-to-twelve-year-old children and a control group of 32 adults measuring their eye-gaze changes in response to compound-internal plural and singular forms. Our results indicate that children rely more upon structural properties of language (in the present case, morphological cues) early in development and that the ability to efficiently integrate information from multiple sources takes time for children to reach adult-like levels.
We demonstrate the workability of an experimental facility that is geared towards the acquisition of articulatory data from a variety of speech styles common in language use, by means of two synchronized electromagnetic articulography (EMA) devices. This approach synthesizes the advantages of real dialogue settings for speech research with a detailed description of the physiological reality of speech production. We describe the facility's method for acquiring synchronized audio streams of two speakers and the system that enables communication among control room technicians, experimenters and participants. Further, we demonstrate the feasibility of the approach by evaluating problems inherent to this specific setup: The first problem is the accuracy of temporal synchronization of the two EMA machines, the second is the severity of electromagnetic interference between the two machines. Our results suggest that the synchronization method used yields an accuracy of approximately 1 ms. Electromagnetic interference was derived from the complex-valued signal amplitudes. This dependent variable was analyzed as a function of the recording status - i.e. on/off - of the interfering machine's transmitters. The intermachine distance was varied between 1 m and 8.5 m. Results suggest that a distance of approximately 6.5 m is appropriate to achieve data quality comparable to that of single speaker recordings.
What theories best characterise the parsing processes triggered upon encountering ambiguity, and what effects do these processes have on eye movement patterns in reading? The present eye-tracking study, which investigated processing of attachment ambiguities of an adjunct in Spanish, suggests that readers sometimes underspecify attachment to save memory resources, consistent with the good-enough account of parsing. Our results confirm a surprising prediction of the good-enough account: high-capacity readers commit to an attachment decision more often than low-capacity participants, leading to more errors and a greater need to reanalyse in garden-path sentences. These results emerged only when we separated functionally different types of regressive eye movements using a scanpath analysis; conventional eye-tracking measures alone would have led to different conclusions. The scanpath analysis also showed that rereading was the dominant strategy for recovering from garden-pathing. Our results may also have broader implications for models of reading processes: reanalysis effects in eye movements occurred late, which suggests that the coupling of oculo-motor control and the parser may not be as tight as assumed in current computational models of eye movement control in reading.
Psycholinguistic research shows that key properties of the human sentence processor are incrementality, connectedness (partial structures contain no unattached nodes), and prediction (upcoming syntactic structure is anticipated). There is currently no broad-coverage parsing model with these properties, however. In this article, we present the first broad-coverage probabilistic parser for PLTAG, a variant of TAG that supports all three requirements. We train our parser on a TAG-transformed version of the Penn Treebank and show that it achieves performance comparable to existing TAG parsers that are incremental but not predictive. We also use our PLTAG model to predict human reading times, demonstrating a better fit on the Dundee eye-tracking corpus than a standard surprisal model.
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.
Vorwort
(2013)
One of the central questions in psycholinguistic is understanding whether and how prosodic phrase boundaries are used to resolve syntactic ambiguities in sentence processing. The present work aimed to answer both, first, the effects of φ- and ι-boundaries on syntactic ambiguity resolution, and second, how the prosodic correlates of the auditory input are taken for the phonetic-phonology mapping in order to attain a meaningful sentence interpretation.
With regard to the first aim, we investigated locally syntactic ambiguities involving either φ- or ι-phrase boundaries in German and the structural preference that listeners have, based on the prosodic content. The experiments described in this work show that German listeners exploit both types of prosodic phrase boundaries to resolve local syntactic ambiguities, that however, their disambiguation altered by the presence or absence of prosodic cues correlated with the corresponding boundary. Specifically, the perception data revealed that the phonetically measured prosodic correlates of each prosodic boundary such as pitch accents, boundary tones, deaccentuation and durational properties do not contribute to ambiguity resolution in equal measure. Rather, it is the case that listeners rely primarily on prefinal lengthening as a correlate of phrasing in the vicinity of φ-phrase boundaries, while at the level of the ι-phrase boundary, boundary tones serve as phrasal cues. This way the results of the present work take account of the as yet missing information on individual contributions of prosodic correlates on listeners’ disambiguation of syntactically ambiguous sentences in German. It further implies that the question of how German listeners resolve syntactic ambiguities cannot simply be attributed to the presence or absence of prosodic correlates. The interpretation of the phrasal structure rather depends on a more general picture of cohesion between prosodic correlates and prosodic boundary sizes.
With respect to the second aim, the processing models proposed in the present work describe a specific phonetics-phonology mapping in the vicinity of both phrase boundaries. It is assumed that auditory sentence processing proceeds in several successively organized steps, during which listeners transform overt phonetic forms into language specific abstract surface forms. This process is referred to as phonetics-phonology mapping in the present work. Perceptual evidence resulting from the experiments of the present work suggest that the phonetics-phonology mapping is guided by the above mentioned boundary related prosodic correlates. The resulting abstract phonological structure is subjected to the syntax-prosody mapping, in turn. The outcome of the presented perception experiments are modulated in an Optimality-Theoretic framework. The offered OT-models are grounded on the assumption that single prosodic correlates are used by listeners as a signal to syntax in sentence processing. This is in line with studies arguing that the prosodic phrase structure determines the syntactic parse (Cutler et al., 1997; Warren et al., 1995; Pynte & Prieur, 1996; Snedeker & Trueswell, 2003; Kjelgaard & Speer, 1999), to name just a few.
This dissertation is about factors that contribute to the surface forms of tones in connected speech in Akan. Akan is an African tone language, which is spoken in Ghana. It has two level tones (low and high), automatic and non-automatic downstep. Downstep is the major factor that influences the surface forms of tones. The thesis shows that downstep is caused by declination. It is argued that declination is an intonational property of Akan, which serves to signal coherence. A phonological representation using a high and a low register tone, associating to the left and right edge of an intonational phrase (IP), respectively, is proposed. Declination/downstep is modelled using a (phonetic) pitch implementation algorithm (Liberman & Pierrehumbert, 1984). An innovative application of the algorithm is presented, which naturally captures the relation between declination and downstep in Akan. Another important factor is the prosodic manifestation of sentence level pragmatic meanings, such as sentence mode and focus. Regarding the former, the thesis shows that a post-lexical low tone, which associates with the right edge of an IP, signals interrogativity. Additionally, lexical tones in Yes – No questions are realized in a higher pitch register, which does not lead to a reduction of declination. It is claimed that the higher register is not part of the phonological representation in Akan, but that it emerges at the phonetic level to compensate for the ‘unnatural’ form of the question morpheme and to satisfy the Frequency code (Gussenhoven, 2002; 2004). An extension of Rialland’s (2007) typology in terms of a new category called “low tense” question prosody is proposed. Concerning focus marking, it is argued that the use of the morpho-syntactic focus marking strategy is related to extra grammatical factors, such as hearer expectation, discourse expectability (Zimmermann, 2007) and emphasis (Hartmann, 2008). If a speaker of Akan wants to highlight a particular element in a sentence, in-situ, i.e. by means of prosody, the default prosodic structure is modified in such a way that the focused element forms its own phonological phrase (pP). If it is already contained in a pP, the boundary deliminating the focused element is enhanced (Féry, 2012). This restructuring/enhancement is accompanied by an interruption of the otherwise continuous melody due to insertion of a pause and/or a glottal stop. Beside declination and intonation, raising of H tones applies in Akan. H raising is analyzed as a local anticipatory planning effect, employed at the phonetic level, which enhances the perceptual distance between low and high tones. Low tones are raised, if they are wedged between two high tones. L raising is argued to be a local carryover effect (co-articulation). Further, it is demonstrated that global anticipatory raising takes place. It is shown that Akan speakers anticipate the length of an IP. Preplanning (anticipatory raising) is argued to be an important process at the level of pitch implementation. It serves to ensure that declination can be maintained throughout the IP, which prevents pitch resetting.
The melody of an Akan sentence is largely determined by the choice of words. The inventory of post-lexical tones is small. It consists of post-lexical register tones, which trigger declination and post-lexical intonational tones, which signal sentence type. The overall melodic shape is falling. At the local level, H raising and L raising occur. At the global level, initial low and high tones are realized higher if they occur in a long and/or complex sentence. This dissertation shows that many factors, which emerge at different levels of the tone production process, contribute to the surface form of tones in Akan.
Der W-Fragen-Erwerb stellt einen Teilbereich der kindlichen Syntaxentwicklung dar, die sich maßgeblich innerhalb der ersten drei Lebensjahre eines Kindes vollzieht. Eine wesentliche Rolle spielen dabei zwei Bewegungsoperationen, die sich auf die Position des Interrogativpronomens an die erste Stelle der W-Frage sowie die Position des Verbs an die zweite Stelle beziehen. In drei Studien wurde einerseits untersucht, ob deutschsprachige Kinder, die noch keine W-Fragen produzieren können, in der Lage sind, grammatische von ungrammatischen W-Fragen zu unterscheiden und andererseits, welche Leistungen sprachunauffällige und sprachauffällige deutschsprachige Kinder beim Verstehen und Korrigieren unterschiedlich komplexer W-Fragen (positive und negative W-Fragen) zeigen. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf ein frühes syntaktisches Wissen über W-Fragen im Spracherwerb hin und stützen damit die Annahme einer Kontinuität der kindlichen Grammatik zur Standardsprache. Auch scheinen sprachauffällige Kinder sich beim Erwerb von W-Fragen nicht qualitativ von sprachgesunden Kindern zu unterscheiden, sondern W-Fragen lediglich später korrekt umzusetzen. In beiden Populationen konnte ein syntaktischer Ökonomieeffekt beobachtet werden, der für eine spätere Umsetzung der Verbbewegung im Vergleich zur Bewegung des W-Elementes spricht.
An important strand of research has investigated the question of how children acquire a morphological system using offline data from spontaneous or elicited child language. Most of these studies have found dissociations in how children apply regular and irregular inflection (Marcus et al. 1992, Weyerts & Clahsen 1994, Rothweiler & Clahsen 1993). These studies have considerably deepened our understanding of how linguistic knowledge is acquired and organised in the human mind. Their methodological procedures, however, do not involve measurements of how children process morphologically complex forms in real time. To date, little is known about how children process inflected word forms. The aim of this study is to investigate children’s processing of inflected words in a series of on-line reaction time experiments. We used a cross-modal priming experiment to test for decompositional effects on the central level. We used a speeded production task and a lexical decision task to test for frequency effects on access level in production and recognition. Children’s behaviour was compared to adults’ behaviour towards three participle types (-t participles, e.g. getanzt ‘danced’ vs. -n participles with stem change, e.g. gebrochen ‘broken’ vs.-n participles without stem change, e.g. geschlafen ‘slept’). For the central level, results indicate that -t participles but not -n participles have decomposed representations. For the access level, results indicate that -t participles are represented according to their morphemes and additionally as full forms, at least from the age of nine years onwards (Pinker 1999 and Clahsen et al. 2004). Further evidence suggested that -n participles are represented as full-form entries on access level and that -n participles without stem change may encode morphological structure (cf. Clahsen et al. 2003). Out data also suggests that processing strategies for -t participles are differently applied in recognition and production. These results provide evidence that children (within the age range tested) employ the same mechanisms for processing participles as adults. The child lexicon grows as children form additional full-form representations for -t participles on access level and elaborate their full-form lexical representations of -n participles on central level. These results are consistent with processing as explained in dual-system theories.
Interactive generation of effective discourse in situated context : a planning-based approach
(2013)
As our modern-built structures are becoming increasingly complex, carrying out basic tasks such as identifying points or objects of interest in our surroundings can consume considerable time and cognitive resources. In this thesis, we present a computational approach to converting contextual information about a person's physical environment into natural language, with the aim of helping this person identify given task-related entities in their environment. Using efficient methods from automated planning - the field of artificial intelligence concerned with finding courses of action that can achieve a goal -, we generate discourse that interactively guides a hearer through completing their task. Our approach addresses the challenges of controlling, adapting to, and monitoring the situated context. To this end, we develop a natural language generation system that plans how to manipulate the non-linguistic context of a scene in order to make it more favorable for references to task-related objects. This strategy distributes a hearer's cognitive load of interpreting a reference over multiple utterances rather than one long referring expression. Further, to optimize the system's linguistic choices in a given context, we learn how to distinguish speaker behavior according to its helpfulness to hearers in a certain situation, and we model the behavior of human speakers that has been proven helpful. The resulting system combines symbolic with statistical reasoning, and tackles the problem of making non-trivial referential choices in rich context. Finally, we complement our approach with a mechanism for preventing potential misunderstandings after a reference has been generated. Employing remote eye-tracking technology, we monitor the hearer's gaze and find that it provides a reliable index of online referential understanding, even in dynamically changing scenes. We thus present a system that exploits hearer gaze to generate rapid feedback on a per-utterance basis, further enhancing its effectiveness. Though we evaluate our approach in virtual environments, the efficiency of our planning-based model suggests that this work could be a step towards effective conversational human-computer interaction situated in the real world.
Das Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik wird seit 2007 jährlich vom Verband für Patholinguistik e.V. (vpl) durchgeführt. Das 6. Herbsttreffen mit dem Schwerpunktthema "Labyrinth Grammatik: Therapie von syntaktischen Störungen bei Kindern und Erwachsenen" fand am 17.11.2012 in Potsdam statt. Im vorliegenden Tagungsband finden sich alle Beiträge der Veranstaltung: die vier Hauptvorträge zum Schwerpunkthema, die Vorträge aus Praxis und Forschung von vier Patholinguistinnen in der Reihe Spektrum Patholinguistik sowie die Abstracts der Posterpräsentation.