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"Wortabruf im Handumdrehen"?
(2017)
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.
Which repair strategy does the language system deploy when it gets garden-pathed, and what can regressive eye movements in reading tell us about reanalysis strategies? Several influential eye-tracking studies on syntactic reanalysis (Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Meseguer, Carreiras, & Clifton, 2002; Mitchell, Shen, Green, & Hodgson, 2008) have addressed this question by examining scanpaths, i.e., sequential patterns of eye fixations. However, in the absence of a suitable method for analyzing scanpaths, these studies relied on simplified dependent measures that are arguably ambiguous and hard to interpret. We address the theoretical question of repair strategy by developing a new method that quantifies scanpath similarity. Our method reveals several distinct fixation strategies associated with reanalysis that went undetected in a previously published data set (Meseguer et al., 2002). One prevalent pattern suggests re-parsing of the sentence, a strategy that has been discussed in the literature (Frazier & Rayner, 1982); however, readers differed tremendously in how they orchestrated the various fixation strategies. Our results suggest that the human parsing system non-deterministically adopts different strategies when confronted with the disambiguating material in garden-path sentences.
Gender stereotypes influence subjective beliefs about the world, and this is reflected in our use of language. But do gender biases in language transparently reflect subjective beliefs? Or is the process of translating thought to language itself biased? During the 2016 United States (N = 24,863) and 2017 United Kingdom (N = 2,609) electoral campaigns, we compared participants' beliefs about the gender of the next head of government with their use and interpretation of pronouns referring to the next head of government. In the United States, even when the female candidate was expected to win, she pronouns were rarely produced and induced substantial comprehension disruption. In the United Kingdom, where the incumbent female candidate was heavily favored, she pronouns were preferred in production but yielded no comprehension advantage. These and other findings suggest that the language system itself is a source of implicit biases above and beyond previously known biases, such as those measured by the Implicit Association Test.
Gender stereotypes influence subjective beliefs about the world, and this is reflected in our use of language. But do gender biases in language transparently reflect subjective beliefs? Or is the process of translating thought to language itself biased? During the 2016 United States (N = 24,863) and 2017 United Kingdom (N = 2,609) electoral campaigns, we compared participants' beliefs about the gender of the next head of government with their use and interpretation of pronouns referring to the next head of government. In the United States, even when the female candidate was expected to win, she pronouns were rarely produced and induced substantial comprehension disruption. In the United Kingdom, where the incumbent female candidate was heavily favored, she pronouns were preferred in production but yielded no comprehension advantage. These and other findings suggest that the language system itself is a source of implicit biases above and beyond previously known biases, such as those measured by the Implicit Association Test.
Scanpaths have played an important role in classic research on reading behavior. Nevertheless, they have largely been neglected in later research perhaps due to a lack of suitable analytical tools. Recently, von der Malsburg and Vasishth (2011) proposed a new measure for quantifying differences between scanpaths and demonstrated that this measure can recover effects that were missed with the traditional eyetracking measures. However, the sentences used in that study were difficult to process and scanpath effects accordingly strong. The purpose of the present study was to test the validity, sensitivity, and scope of applicability of the scanpath measure, using simple sentences that are typically read from left to right. We derived predictions for the regularity of scanpaths from the literature on oculomotor control, sentence processing, and cognitive aging and tested these predictions using the scanpath measure and a large database of eye movements. All predictions were confirmed: Sentences with short words and syntactically more difficult sentences elicited more irregular scanpaths. Also, older readers produced more irregular scanpaths than younger readers. In addition, we found an effect that was not reported earlier: Syntax had a smaller influence on the eye movements of older readers than on those of young readers. We discuss this interaction of syntactic parsing cost with age in terms of shifts in processing strategies and a decline of executive control as readers age. Overall, our results demonstrate the validity and sensitivity of the scanpath measure and thus establish it as a productive and versatile tool for reading research.
False positives and other statistical errors in standard analyses of eye movements in reading
(2017)
In research on eye movements in reading, it is common to analyze a number of canonical dependent measures to study how the effects of a manipulation unfold over time. Although this gives rise to the well-known multiple comparisons problem, i.e. an inflated probability that the null hypothesis is incorrectly rejected (Type I error), it is accepted standard practice not to apply any correction procedures. Instead, there appears to be a widespread belief that corrections are not necessary because the increase in false positives is too small to matter. To our knowledge, no formal argument has ever been presented to justify this assumption. Here, we report a computational investigation of this issue using Monte Carlo simulations. Our results show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, false positives are increased to unacceptable levels when no corrections are applied. Our simulations also show that counter-measures like the Bonferroni correction keep false positives in check while reducing statistical power only moderately. Hence, there is little reason why such corrections should not be made a standard requirement. Further, we discuss three statistical illusions that can arise when statistical power is low, and we show how power can be improved to prevent these illusions. In sum, our work renders a detailed picture of the various types of statistical errors than can occur in studies of reading behavior and we provide concrete guidance about how these errors can be avoided. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The late mediaeval prose epic Loher und Muller constantly challenges a naive interpretation of what constitutes justice by confronting it over and over again with extreme cases. Generally speaking, 'poetic justice' succeeds in establishing coherence and propel the narrative forward. The constituents of societal norms and of laws are nevertheless relentlessly questioned - to such an extent that the narrative inquiry occasionally departs from the common understanding of justice. With its focus on morality, especially the presence or absence of faith, Loher und Muller is primarily concerned with the potential for conflict inherent in medieval constructions of legality and justice. In doing so, the epic opens up a narrative playground unencumbered by legal constraints as - after all - literature need not comply with medieval jurisdiction and its claims to the validity and scope of its writings. It is literature's privilege to facilitate unfamiliar ways of looking. The playful - but by no means inconsequential - casuistry played out in Loher und Maller gives rise to a 'probable' world tangential to historical reality and its understanding of justice and the law.
Das 11. Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik mit dem Schwerpunktthema »Gut gestimmt: Diagnostik und Therapie bei Dysphonie« fand am 18.11.2017 in Potsdam statt. Das Herbsttreffen wird seit 2007 jährlich vom Verband für Patholinguistik e.V. (vpl) durchgeführt. Der vorliegende Tagungsband beinhaltet die Hauptvorträge zum Schwerpunktthema sowie Beiträge zu den Kurzvorträgen »Spektrum Patholinguistik« und der Posterpräsentationen zu weiteren Themen aus der sprachtherapeutischen Forschung und Praxis.
Counting Markedness
(2003)
This paper reports the results of a corpus investigation on case conflicts in German argument free relative constructions. We investigate how corpus frequencies reflect the relative markedness of free relative and correlative constructions, the relative markedness of different case conflict configurations, and the relative markedness of different conflict resolution strategies. Section 1 introduces the conception of markedness as used in Optimality Theory. Section 2 introduces the facts about German free relative clauses, and section 3 presents the results of the corpus study. By and large, markedness and frequency go hand in hand. However, configurations at the highest end of the markedness scale rarely show up in corpus data, and for the configuration at the lowest end we found an unexpected outcome: the more marked structure is preferred.
The simple generator
(2006)
I argue that the shift of explanatory burden from the generator to the evaluator in OT syntax – together with the difficulties that arise when we try to formulate a working theory of the interfaces of syntax – leads to a number of assumptions about syntactic structures in OT which are quite different from those typical of minimalist syntax: formal features, as driving forces behind syntactic movement, are useless, and derivational and representational economy are problematic for both empirical and conceptual reasons. The notion of markedness, central in Optimality Theory, is not fully compatible with the idea of synactic economy. Even more so, seemingly obvious cases of blocking by structural economy do not seem to result from grammar proper, but reflect (economical) aspects of language use.
Content: 1 The Typology 1.1 Object Placement 2 Treatment of StG in terms of LF Movement – with and without Head Movement 3 An OT-solution in terms of linearisation (‘LF-to-PF-Mapping’) 3.1 The trigger for additional orders: Focus 3.2 Competitions 3.3 Summary 4 RP 4.1 LF Movement – with and without Head Movement 4.2 The OT-account for RP 4.3 Competitions 5 Summary
Yet another Theta-System
(2002)
Background
Dysphagia is a major clinical concern in multiple system atrophy (MSA). A detailed evaluation of its major endoscopic features compared with Parkinson's disease (PD) is lacking.
Objective
This study systematically assessed dysphagia in MSA compared with PD and correlated subjective dysphagia to objective endoscopic findings.
Methods
Fifty-seven patients with MSA (median, 64 [interquartile range (IQR): 59-71] years; 35 women) underwent flexible endoscopic evaluation of swallowing using a specific MSA-flexible endoscopic evaluation of swallowing task protocol. Findings were compared with an age-matched cohort of 57 patients with PD (median, 67 [interquartile range: 60-73] years; 28 women). In a subcohort, subjective dysphagia was assessed using the Swallowing Disturbance Questionnaire and correlated to endoscopy findings.
Results
Patients with MSA predominantly showed symptoms suggestive of oral-phase disturbance (premature spillage, 75.4%, piecemeal deglutition, 75.4%). Pharyngeal-phase symptoms occurred less often (pharyngeal residues, 50.9%; penetration/aspiration, 28.1%). In contrast, pharyngeal symptoms were the most common finding in PD (pharyngeal residues, 47.4%). Oral symptoms occurred less frequently in PD (premature spillage, 15.8%, P < 0.001; piecemeal deglutition, 1.8%, P < 0.01). Patients with MSA had a greater risk for oral-phase disturbances with increased disease severity (P < 0.05; odds ratio, 3.15). Patients with MSA showed a significantly higher intraindividual interswallow variability compared with PD. When correlating Swallowing Disturbance Questionnaire scores with endoscopy results, its cutoff, validated for PD, was not sensitive enough to identify patients with MSA with dysphagia. We developed a subscore for identifying dysphagia in MSA and calculated a new cutoff (sensitivity 85%, specificity 100%).
Conclusions
In contrast with patients with PD, patients with dysphagic MSA more frequently present with oral-phase symptoms and a significantly higher intraindividual interswallow variability. A novel Swallowing Disturbance Questionnaire MSA subscore may be a valuable tool to identify patients with MSA with early oropharyngeal dysphagia.
The present fMRI study of semantic fluency for animal and tool names provides further evidence for category- specific brain activations, and reports task-related changes in effective connectivity among defined cerebral regions. Two partially segregated systems of functional integration were highlighted: the tool condition was associated with an enhancement of connectivity within left hemispheric regions, including the inferior prefrontal and premotor cortex, the inferior parietal lobule and the temporo-occipital junction; the animal condition was associated with greater coupling among left visual associative regions. These category-specific functional differences extend the evidence for anatomical specialization to lexical search tasks, and provide for the first time evidence of category-specific patterns of functional integration in word-retrieval. (c) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
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.
This study examines the influence of orthography on the processing of reduced word forms. For this purpose, we compared the impact of phonological variation with the impact of spelling-sound consistency on the processing of words that may be produced with or without the vowel schwa. Participants learnt novel French words in which the vowel schwa was present or absent in the first syllable. In Experiment 1, the words were consistently produced without schwa or produced in a variable manner (i.e., sometimes produced with and sometimes produced without schwa). In Experiment 2, words were always produced in a consistent manner, but an orthographic exposure phase was included in which words that were produced without schwa were either spelled with or without the letter < e >. Results from naming and eye-tracking tasks suggest that both phonological variation and spelling-sound consistency influence the processing of spoken novel words. However, the influence of phonological variation outweighs the effect of spelling-sound consistency. Our findings therefore suggest that the influence of orthography on the processing of reduced word forms is relatively small.
On the basis of certain semantic intuitions, Barros (2012) argues that ellipsis does not require structural isomorphism between elided structure and its antecedent. We tackle this claim. Semantic intuitions cannot be a pointer to the analysis of silent structure. We provide empirical evidence that raises the question of to what extent semantic intuitions about plausible articulable syntax must inform one's analysis of silent structure. We conclude that the answer to this question must be crosslinguistically informed. We conjecture that ellipsis introduces ellipsis-specific interpretive mechanisms, so that intuitions about "how the unelided structure would be interpreted" are not empirically relevant.
A series of studies have distinguished two types of but, namely, corrective and counterexpectational. The difference between these two types has been considered largely semantic/pragmatic. This article shows that the semantic difference also translates into a different syntax for each type of but. More precisely, corrective but always requires clause-level coordination, with apparent counterexamples being derived through ellipsis within the second conjunct. On the other hand, counterexpectational but is not restricted in this way, and offers the possibility of coordination of both clausal and subclausal constituents. From this difference, it is possible to derive a number of syntactic asymmetries between corrective and counterexpectational but.
Phase theory
(2011)
Potts (Nat Lang Linguist Theory 20:623–689, 2002a) et seq. presents an analysis of gap-containing supplements (primarily, as-parentheticals) where the gap is modelled as a variable over the semantic type of the constituent that the as-clause adjoins to (the anchor). This much allows the meaning of the gap to be resolved purely compositionally, by defining as as a function that allows the anchor to bind the gap variable. This article presents a class of as-clauses where Potts’s analysis seems to break down, in that the gap cannot be modelled as a variable over the semantic type of the anchor. I propose that these cases can be unified with those in Potts’s work, as well as a larger class of ellipsis phenomena, by assuming that, under certain conditions, surface gaps are composite entities, containing a bound variable and a free variable that are resolved independently of each other. The bound variable is bound by the anchor (just as in Potts’s account), and the free variable is resolved by anaphora to a salient discourse object.
The keynote article (Mayberry & Kluender, 2017) makes an important contribution to questions concerning the existence and characteristics of sensitive periods in language acquisition. Specifically, by comparing groups of non-native L1 and L2 signers, the authors have been able to ingeniously disentangle the effects of maturation from those of early language exposure. Based on L1 versus L2 contrasts, the paper convincingly argues that L2 learning is a less clear test of sensitive periods. Nevertheless, we believe Mayberry and Kluender underestimate the evidence for maturational factors in L2 learning, especially that coming from recent research.
Two opposing viewpoints have been advanced to account for morphological productivity, one according to which some knowledge is couched in the form of operations over variables, and another in which morphological generalization is primarily determined by similarity. We investigated this controversy by examining the generalization of Portuguese verb stems, which fall into one of three conjugation classes. In Study 1, an elicited production task revealed that the generalization of 2nd and 3rd conjugation stems is influenced by the degree of phonological similarity between novel roots and existing verbs, whereas the 1st conjugation generalizes beyond similarity. In Study 2, we directly contrasted two distinct computational implementations of conjugation class assignment in how well they matched the human data: a similarity-driven model that captures phonological similarities, and a dual-mechanism model that implements an explicit distinction between context-free and similarity-based generalizations. The similarity-driven model consistently underestimated 1st conjugation responses and overestimated proportions of 2nd and 3rd conjugation responses, especially for novel verbs that are highly similar to existing verbs of those classes. In contrast, the expected proportions produced by the dual-mechanism model were statistically indistinguishable from human responses. We conclude that both context-free and context-sensitive processes determine the generalization of conjugations in Portuguese, and that similarity-based algorithms of morphological acquisition are insufficient to exhibit default-like generalization. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Gradient Symbolic Computation (GSC) model presented in the keynote article (Goldrick, Putnam & Schwarz) constitutes a significant theoretical development, not only as a model of bilingual code-mixing, but also as a general framework that brings together symbolic grammars and graded representations. The authors are to be commended for successfully integrating a theory of grammatical knowledge with the voluminous research on lexical co-activation in bilinguals. It is, however, unfortunate that a certain conception of bilingualism was inherited from this latter research tradition, one in which the contrast between native and non-native language takes a back seat.
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.
Seven experiments using self-paced reading and eyetracking suggest that omitting the middle verb in a double centre embedding leads to easier processing in English but leads to greater difficulty in German. One commonly accepted explanation for the English pattern-based on data from offline acceptability ratings and due to Gibson and Thomas (1999)- is that working-memory overload leads the comprehender to forget the prediction of the upcoming verb phrase (VP), which reduces working-memory load. We show that this VP-forgetting hypothesis does an excellent job of explaining the English data, but cannot account for the German results. We argue that the English and German results can be explained by the parser's adaptation to the grammatical properties of the languages; in contrast to English, German subordinate clauses always have the verb in clause-final position, and this property of German may lead the German parser to maintain predictions of upcoming VPs more robustly compared to English. The evidence thus argues against language- independent forgetting effects in online sentence processing; working-memory constraints can be conditioned by countervailing influences deriving from grammatical properties of the language under study.
Sentence comprehension requires that the comprehender work out who did what to whom. This process has been characterized as retrieval from memory. This review summarizes the quantitative predictions and empirical coverage of the two existing computational models of retrieval and shows how the predictive performance of these two competing models can be tested against a benchmark data-set. We also show how computational modeling can help us better understand sources of variability in both unimpaired and impaired sentence comprehension.
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.
It is well-known in statistics (e.g., Gelman & Carlin, 2014) that treating a result as publishable just because the p-value is less than 0.05 leads to overoptimistic expectations of replicability. These effects get published, leading to an overconfident belief in replicability. We demonstrate the adverse consequences of this statistical significance filter by conducting seven direct replication attempts (268 participants in total) of a recent paper (Levy & Keller, 2013). We show that the published claims are so noisy that even non-significant results are fully compatible with them. We also demonstrate the contrast between such small-sample studies and a larger-sample study; the latter generally yields a less noisy estimate but also a smaller effect magnitude, which looks less compelling but is more realistic. We reiterate several suggestions from the methodology literature for improving current practices.
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).*
How to embrace variation and accept uncertainty in linguistic and psycholinguistic data analysis
(2021)
The use of statistical inference in linguistics and related areas like psychology typically involves a binary decision: either reject or accept some null hypothesis using statistical significance testing. When statistical power is low, this frequentist data-analytic approach breaks down: null results are uninformative, and effect size estimates associated with significant results are overestimated. Using an example from psycholinguistics, several alternative approaches are demonstrated for reporting inconsistencies between the data and a theoretical prediction. The key here is to focus on committing to a falsifiable prediction, on quantifying uncertainty statistically, and learning to accept the fact that - in almost all practical data analysis situations - we can only draw uncertain conclusions from data, regardless of whether we manage to obtain statistical significance or not. A focus on uncertainty quantification is likely to lead to fewer excessively bold claims that, on closer investigation, may turn out to be not supported by the data.
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.
A commonly used approach to parameter estimation in computational models is the so-called grid search procedure: the entire parameter space is searched in small steps to determine the parameter value that provides the best fit to the observed data. This approach has several disadvantages: first, it can be computationally very expensive; second, one optimal point value of the parameter is reported as the best fit value; we cannot quantify our uncertainty about the parameter estimate. In the main journal article that this methods article accompanies (Jager et al., 2020, Interference patterns in subject-verb agreement and reflexives revisited: A large-sample study, Journal of Memory and Language), we carried out parameter estimation using Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), which is a Bayesian approach that allows us to quantify our uncertainty about the parameter's values given data. This customization has the further advantage that it allows us to generate both prior and posterior predictive distributions of reading times from the cue-based retrieval model of Lewis and Vasishth, 2005. <br /> Instead of the conventional method of using grid search, we use Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) for parameter estimation in the [4] model. <br /> The ABC method of parameter estimation has the advantage that the uncertainty of the parameter can be quantified.
This study compares the development of prosodic processing in French- and German-learning infants. The emergence of language-specific perception of phrase boundaries was directly tested using the same stimuli across these two languages. French-learning (Experiment 1, 2) and German-learning 6- and 8-month-olds (Experiment 3) listened to the same French noun sequences with or without major prosodic boundaries ([Loulou et Manou] [et Nina]; [Loulou et Manou et Nina], respectively). The boundaries were either naturally cued (Experiment 1), or cued exclusively by pitch and duration (Experiment 2, 3). French-learning 6- and 8-month-olds both perceived the natural boundary, but neither perceived the boundary when only two cues were present. In contrast, German-learning infants develop from not perceiving the two-cue boundary at 6 months to perceiving it at 8 months, just like German-learning 8-month-olds listening to German (Wellmann, Holzgrefe, Truckenbrodt, Wartenburger, & Hohle, 2012). In a control experiment (Experiment 4), we found little difference between German and French adult listeners, suggesting that later, French listeners catch up with German listeners. Taken together, these cross-linguistic differences in the perception of identical stimuli provide direct evidence for language-specific development of prosodic boundary perception.
Both social perception and temperament in young infants have been related to social functioning later in life. Previous functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) data (Lloyd-Fox et al., 2009) showed larger blood-oxygenation changes for social compared to non-social stimuli in the posterior temporal cortex of five-month-old infants. We sought to replicate and extend these findings by using fNIRS to study the neural basis of social perception in relation to infant temperament (Negative Affect) in 37 five-to-eight-month-old infants. Infants watched short videos displaying either hand and facial movements of female actors (social dynamic condition) or moving toys and machinery (non-social dynamic condition), while fNIRS data were collected over temporal brain regions. Negative Affect was measured using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire. Results showed significantly larger blood-oxygenation changes in the right posterior-temporal region in the social compared to the non-social condition. Furthermore, this differential activation was smaller in infants showing higher Negative Affect. Our results replicate those of Lloyd-Fox et al. and confirmed that five-to-eight-month-old infants show cortical specialization for social perception. Furthermore, the decreased cortical sensitivity to social stimuli in infants showing high Negative Affect may be an early biomarker for later difficulties in social interaction.
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.
On the distribution of dorsals in complex and simple onsets in child German, Dutch and English
(2009)
Phonology and intonation
(2007)
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.
The present study focuses on A-scrambling in Dutch, a local word-order alternation that typically signals the discourse-anaphoric status of the scrambled constituent. We use cross-modal priming to investigate whether an A-scrambled direct object gives rise to antecedent reactivation effects in the position where a movement theory would postulate a trace. Our results indicate that this is not the case, thereby providing support for a base-generation analysis of A-scrambling in Dutch.
Das Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik wird seit 2007 jährlich vom Verband für Patholinguistik e.V. (vpl) durchgeführt. Die Jubiläumsveranstaltung am 19.11.2011 in Potsdam war nicht nur die 5. Auflage der Veranstaltung, sondern auch ein Fest zum 10jährigen Bestehen des Verbandes. Das Thema lautete "Schluck für Schluck: Dysphagietherapie bei Kindern und Erwachsenen". Im vorliegenden Tagungsband finden sich die Artikel der Hauptvorträge sowie die Abstracts der Posterpräsentationen.
Previous research has shown that heritage speakers struggle with inflectional morphology. 'Limitations of online resources' for processing a non-dominant language has been claimed as one possible reason for these difficulties. To date, however, there is very little experimental evidence on real-time language processing in heritage speakers. Here we report results from a masked priming experiment with 97 bilingual (Turkish/German) heritage speakers and a control group of 40 non-heritage speakers of Turkish examining regular and irregular forms of the Turkish aorist. We found that, for the regular aorist, heritage speakers use the same morphological decomposition mechanism ('affix stripping') as control speakers, whereas for processing irregularly inflected forms they exhibited more variability (i.e., less homogeneous performance) than the control group. Heritage speakers also demonstrated semantic priming effects. At a more general level, these results indicate that heritage speakers draw on multiple sources of information for recognizing morphologically complex words.
Express yourself!
(2022)
Most studies investigating the impact of literacy on oral language processing have shown that literacy provides phonological awareness skills in the processing of oral language. The implications of these results on aphasia tests could be significant and pose questions on the adequacy of such tools for testing non-literate individuals. Aiming at examining the impact of literacy on oral language processing and its implication on aphasia tests, this study tested 12 non-literate and 12 literate individuals with a modified Amharic version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (Paradis and Amberber, 1991, Bilingual Aphasia Test. Amharic version. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.). The problems of phonological awareness skills in oral language processing in non-literates are substantiated. In addition, compared with literate participants, non-literate individuals demonstrated difficulties in the word/sentence-picture matching tasks. This study has also revealed that the Amharic version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test may be viable for testing Amharic-speaking non-literate individuals with aphasia when modifications are incorporated.
This study presents new insights into null subjects, topic drop and the interpretation of topic-dropped elements. Besides providing an empirical data survey, it offers explanations to well-known problems, e.g. syncretisms in the context of null-subject licensing or the marginality of dropping an element which carries oblique case. The book constitutes a valuable source for both empirically and theoretically interested (generative) linguists.
Production of regular and non-regular verbs : evidence for a lexical entry complexity account
(2010)
The incredible productivity and creativity of language depends on two fundamental resources: a mental lexicon and a mental grammar. Rules of grammar enable us to produce and understand complex phrases we have not encountered before and at the same time constrain the computation of complex expressions. The concepts of the mental lexicon and mental grammar have been thoroughly tested by comparing the use of regular versus non-regular word forms. Regular verbs (e.g. walk-walked) are computed using a suffixation rule in a neural system for grammatical processing; non-regular verbs (run-ran) are retrieved from associative memory. The role of regularity has only been explored for the past tense, where regularity is overtly visible. To explore the representation and encoding of regularity as well as the inflectional processes involved in the production of regular and non-regular verbs, this dissertation investigated three groups of German verbs: regular, irregular and hybrid verbs. Hybrid verbs in German have completely regular conjugation in the present tense and irregular conjugation in the past tense. Articulation latencies were measured while participants named pictures of actions, producing the 3rd person singular of regular, hybrid, and irregular verbs in present and past tense. Studying the production of German verbs in past and present tense, this dissertation explored the complexity of lexical entries as a decisive factor in the production of verbs.
Distributed optimality
(2001)
In this thesis I propose a synthesis (Distributed Optimality, DO) between Optimality Theory (OT, Prince & Smolensky, 1993) and a morphological framework in a genuine derivational tradition, namely Distributed Morphology (DM) as developed by Halle & Marantz (1993). By carrying over the apparatus of OT to DM, phenomena which are captured in DM by language-specific rules or features of lexical entries, are given a more principled account in the terms of ranked universal constraints. On the other hand, also the DM part makes two contributions, namely strong locality and impoverishment. The first gives rise to a simple formal interpretation of DO, while the latter is shown to be indispensable in any theoretically satisfying account of agreement morphology. The empirical basis of the work is given by the complex agreement morphology of genetically different languages. Theoretical focus is mainly on two areas: First, so-called direction marking which is shown to be preferably treated in terms of constraints on feature realization. Second, the effects of precedence constraints which are claimed to regulate the status of agreement affixes as prefixes or suffixes and their respective order. A universal typology for the order of agreement categories by means of OT-constraints is proposed.
The individual’s mental lexicon comprises all known words as well related infor-mation on semantics, orthography and phonology. Moreover, entries connect due to simi-larities in these language domains building a large network structure. The access to lexical information is crucial for processing of words and sentences. Thus, a lack of information in-hibits the retrieval and can cause language processing difficulties. Hence, the composition of the mental lexicon is essential for language skills and its assessment is a central topic of lin-guistic and educational research.
In early childhood, measurement of the mental lexicon is uncomplicated, for example through parental questionnaires or the analysis of speech samples. However, with growing content the measurement becomes more challenging: With more and more words in the mental lexicon, the inclusion of all possible known words into a test or questionnaire be-comes impossible. That is why there is a lack of methods to assess the mental lexicon for school children and adults. For the same reason, there are only few findings on the courses of lexical development during school years as well as its specific effect on other language skills. This dissertation is supposed to close this gap by pursuing two major goals: First, I wanted to develop a method to assess lexical features, namely lexicon size and lexical struc-ture, for children of different age groups. Second, I aimed to describe the results of this method in terms of lexical development of size and structure. Findings were intended to help understanding mechanisms of lexical acquisition and inform theories on vocabulary growth.
The approach is based on the dictionary method where a sample of words out of a dictionary is tested and results are projected on the whole dictionary to determine an indi-vidual’s lexicon size. In the present study, the childLex corpus, a written language corpus for children in German, served as the basis for lexicon size estimation. The corpus is assumed to comprise all words children attending primary school could know. Testing a sample of words out of the corpus enables projection of the results on the whole corpus. For this purpose, a vocabulary test based on the corpus was developed. Afterwards, test performance of virtual participants was simulated by drawing different lexicon sizes from the corpus and comparing whether the test items were included in the lexicon or not. This allowed determination of the relation between test performance and total lexicon size and thus could be transferred to a sample of real participants. Besides lexicon size, lexical content could be approximated with this approach and analyzed in terms of lexical structure.
To pursue the presented aims and establish the sampling method, I conducted three consecutive studies. Study 1 includes the development of a vocabulary test based on the childLex corpus. The testing was based on the yes/no format and included three versions for different age groups. The validation grounded on the Rasch Model shows that it is a valid instrument to measure vocabulary for primary school children in German. In Study 2, I estab-lished the method to estimate lexicon sizes and present results on lexical development dur-ing primary school. Plausible results demonstrate that lexical growth follows a quadratic function starting with about 6,000 words at the beginning of school and about 73,000 words on average for young adults. Moreover, the study revealed large interindividual differences. Study 3 focused on the analysis of network structures and their development in the mental lexicon due to orthographic similarities. It demonstrates that networks possess small-word characteristics and decrease in interconnectivity with age.
Taken together, this dissertation provides an innovative approach for the assessment and description of the development of the mental lexicon from primary school onwards. The studies determine recent results on lexical acquisition in different age groups that were miss-ing before. They impressively show the importance of this period and display the existence of extensive interindividual differences in lexical development. One central aim of future research needs to address the causes and prevention of these differences. In addition, the application of the method for further research (e.g. the adaptation for other target groups) and teaching purposes (e.g. adaptation of texts for different target groups) appears to be promising.
The paper revisits Duffield's (2007) (Duffield, Nigel. 2007. Aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure: Separating tense from assertion. Linguistics 45(4). 765-814) analysis of the correlation between the position of a 'when'-phrase and the temporal reference of a bare sentence in Vietnamese. Bare sentences in Vietnamese, based on (Smith, Carlota S. & Mary S. Erbaugh. 2005. Temporal interpretation in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics 43(4). 713-756), are argued to obtain their temporal interpretation from their aspectual composition, and the default temporal reference: bounded events are located in the past, unbounded events at present. It is shown that the correlation so observed in when-questions is superficial, and is tied to the syntax and semantics of temporal modification and the requirement that temporal adverbials denoting future time is base generated in sentence-initial position, and past time adverbials in sentence-final position. A 'when'-phrase, being temporally underspecified, obtains its temporal value from its base position. However, the correlation between word order and temporal reference in argument wh-questions and declaratives is factual, depending on whether the predicate-argument configuration allows for a telic interpretation or not. To be specific, it is dependent on whether the application of Generic Modification (Snyder, William. 2012. Parameter theory and motion predicates. In Violeta Demonte & Louise McNally (eds.), Telicity, change, and state. Acrosscategorial view of event structure, 279-299. Oxford: Oxford University Press) or accomplishment composition is realized. Canonical declaratives, and argument wh-questions, with telicity inducing material, license GM or accomplishment composition, yielding bounded events, hence past; by contrast, their noncanonical counterparts block GM or accomplishment composition, giving rise to unbounded event descriptions, hence non-past.
"Spektrum Patholinguistik" (Band 2) ist der Tagungsband zum 2. Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik, das der Verband für Patholinguistik (vpl) e.V. am 22.11.2008 an der Universität Potsdam veranstaltet hat. Zum Schwerpunktthema "Ein Kopf - Zwei Sprachen: Mehrsprachigkeit in Forschung und Therapie" sind die drei Hauptvorträge und vier Abstracts von Posterpräsentationen veröffentlicht. Desweiteren enthält der Tagungsband freie Beiträge, u.a. zu Satzverarbeitung und Agrammatismus, Lesestrategien und LRS, Prosodie-Entwicklung, kindlichen Aphasien, Dysphagie-Therapie sowie zu kognitiven Defiziten bei älteren Menschen.
While the Information Structure (IS) is most naturally interpreted as 'structure of information', some may argue that it is structure of something else, and others may object to the use of the word 'structure'. This paper focuses on the question of whether the informational component can have structural properties such that it can be called 'structure'. The preliminary conclusion is that, although there are some vague indications of structurehood in it, it is perhaps better understood to be a representation that encodes a finite set of information-based partitions, rather than structure.
The most recent trend in the studies of LF intervention effects makes crucial reference to focusing effects on the interveners, and this paper critically examines the representative analyses of the focus-based approach. While each analysis has its own merits and shortcomings, I argue that a pragmatic analysis that does not make appeal to syntactic configurations is better equipped to deal with many of the complex and delicate facts surrounding intervention effects.
During a cue-distractor task, participants repeatedly produce syllables prompted by visual cues. Distractor syllables are presented to participants via headphones 150 ms after the visual cue (before any response). The task has been used to demonstrate perceptuomotor integration effects (perception effects on production): response times (RTs) speed up as the distractor shares more phonetic properties with the response. Here it is demonstrated that perceptuomotor integration is not limited to RTs. Voice Onset Times (VOTs) of the distractor syllables were systematically varied and their impact on responses was measured. Results demonstrate trial-specific convergence of response syllables to VOT values of distractor syllables.
Accusative Unaccusatives
(2019)
It has been long agreed by formal and functional researchers (primarily based on English data) that contrastive topic marking, namely marking a constituent as a contrastive topic via the B-accent/the rising intonation contour) requires the co-occurrence of focus marking via the A-accent/the falling intonation contour (see Sturgeon 2006, and references therein). However, this consensus has recently been disputed by new findings indicating the occurrence of utterances with only B-accent, dubbed as lone contrastive topic (Büring 2003, Constant 2014). In this paper, I argue, based on the data in Vietnamese, that the presence of lone contrastive topic is just apparent, and that the focus that co-occurs with the seemingly lone contrastive topic is a verum focus.
This article draws on work at the interface of grammar and interaction to argue that the clause is a locus of interaction, in the sense that it is one of the most frequent grammatical formats which speakers orient to in projecting what actions are being done by others' utterances and in acting on these projections. Yet the way in which the clause affords grammatical projectability varies significantly from language to language. In fact, it depends on the nature of the clausal grammatical formats which are available as resources in a language: in some languages these allow early projection in the turn unit (as in English), in others they do not (as in Japanese). We focus here on these two languages and show that their variable grammatical projectability has repercussions on the way in which three interactional phenomena - next-turn onset, co-construction, and turn-unit extension - are realized in the respective speech communities. In each case the practices used are precisely the ones which the clausal grammatical formats in the given language promote. The evidence thus suggests that clauses are interactionally warranted, if variably built, formats for social action
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.
Understanding the rapidly developing building blocks of speech perception in infancy requires a close look at the auditory prerequisites for speech sound processing. Pioneering studies have demonstrated that hemispheric specializations for language processing are already present in early infancy. However, whether these computational asymmetries can be considered a function of linguistic attributes or a consequence of basic temporal signal properties is under debate. Several studies in adults link hemispheric specialization for certain aspects of speech perception to an asymmetry in cortical tuning and reveal that the auditory cortices are differentially sensitive to spectrotemporal features of speech. Applying concurrent electrophysiological (EEG) and hemodynamic (near-infrared spectroscopy) recording to newborn infants listening to temporally structured nonspeech signals, we provide evidence that newborns process nonlinguistic acoustic stimuli that share critical temporal features with language in a differential manner. The newborn brain preferentially processes temporal modulations especially relevant for phoneme perception. In line with multi-time-resolution conceptions, modulations on the time scale of phonemes elicit strong bilateral cortical responses. Our data furthermore suggest that responses to slow acoustic modulations are lateralized to the right hemisphere. That is, the newborn auditory cortex is sensitive to the temporal structure of the auditory input and shows an emerging tendency for functional asymmetry. Hence, our findings support the hypothesis that development of speech perception is linked to basic capacities in auditory processing. From birth, the brain is tuned to critical temporal properties of linguistic signals to facilitate one of the major needs of humans: to communicate.
We present a system for the linguistic exploration and analysis of lexical cohesion in English texts. Using an electronic thesaurus-like resource, Princeton WordNet, and the Brown Corpus of English, we have implemented a process of annotating text with lexical chains and a graphical user interface for inspection of the annotated text. We describe the system and report on some sample linguistic analyses carried out using the combined thesaurus-corpus resource.
Das 16. Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik mit dem Schwerpunktthema »Schnittstelle Alltag: Transfer und Teilhabe in der Sprachtherapie« fand am 19.11.2022 als Online-Veranstaltung statt. Das Herbsttreffen wird seit 2007 jährlich vom Verband für Patholinguistik e.V. (vpl), seit 2021 vom Deutschen Bundesverband für akademische Sprachtherapie und Logopädie (dbs) in Kooperation mit der Universität Potsdam durchgeführt. Der vorliegende Tagungsband beinhaltet die Vorträge zum Schwerpunktthema sowie die Posterpräsentationen zu weiteren Themen aus der sprachtherapeutischen Forschung und Praxis.
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.
Infants' lexical processing is modulated by featural manipulations made to words, suggesting that early lexical representations are sufficiently specified to establish a match with the corresponding label. However, the precise degree of detail in early words requires further investigation due to equivocal findings. We studied this question by assessing children’s sensitivity to the degree of featural manipulation (Chapters 2 and 3), and sensitivity to the featural makeup of homorganic and heterorganic consonant clusters (Chapter 4). Gradient sensitivity on the one hand and sensitivity to homorganicity on the other hand would suggest that lexical processing makes use of sub-phonemic information, which in turn would indicate that early words contain sub-phonemic detail. The studies presented in this thesis assess children’s sensitivity to sub-phonemic detail using minimally demanding online paradigms suitable for infants: single-picture pupillometry and intermodal preferential looking. Such paradigms have the potential to uncover lexical knowledge that may be masked otherwise due to cognitive limitations. The study reported in Chapter 2 obtained a differential response in pupil dilation to the degree of featural manipulation, a result consistent with gradient sensitivity. The study reported in Chapter 3 obtained a differential response in proportion of looking time and pupil dilation to the degree of featural manipulation, a result again consistent with gradient sensitivity. The study reported in Chapter 4 obtained a differential response to the manipulation of homorganic and heterorganic consonant clusters, a result consistent with sensitivity to homorganicity. These results suggest that infants' lexical representations are not only specific, but also detailed to the extent that they contain sub-phonemic information.
We present a lexicon-based approach to extracting sentiment from text. The Semantic Orientation CALculator (SO-CAL) uses dictionaries of words annotated with their semantic orientation (polarity and strength), and incorporates intensification and negation. SO-CAL is applied to the polarity classification task, the process of assigning a positive or negative label to a text that captures the text's opinion towards its main subject matter. We show that SO-CAL's performance is consistent across domains and on completely unseen data. Additionally, we describe the process of dictionary creation, and our use of Mechanical Turk to check dictionaries for consistency and reliability.
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.
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.
Previous studies have shown that characteristics of a person's first language (L1) may transfer to a second language (L2). The current study looks at the extent to which this holds for aspects of intonation as well. More specifically, we investigate to what extent traces of the L1 can be discerned in the way intonation is used in the L2 for two functions: (1) to highlight certain words by making them sound more prominent and (2) to signal continuation or finality in a list by manipulating the speech melody. To this end, the article presents an explorative study into the way focus and boundaries are marked prosodically in Zulu, and it also compares such prosodic functions in two variants of English in South Africa, i.e., English spoken as an L1, and English spoken as an L2/additional language by speakers who have Zulu as their L1. The latter language is commonly referred to as Black South African English. This comparison is interesting from a typological perspective, as Zulu is intonationally different from English, especially in the way prosody is exploited for signalling informationally important stretches of speech. Using a specific elicitation procedure, we found in a first study that speakers of South African English (as L1) mark focused words and position within a list by intonational means, just as in other L1 varieties of English, whereas Zulu only uses intonation for marking continuity or finality. A second study focused on speakers of Black South African English, and compared the prosody of proficient versus less proficient speakers. We found that the proficient speakers were perceptually equivalent to L1 speakers of English in their use of intonation for marking focus and boundaries. The less proficient speakers marked boundaries in a similar way as L1 speakers of English, but did not use prosody for signalling focus, analogous to what is typical of their native language. Acoustic observations match these perceptual results.
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.
The effect of decay and lexical uncertainty on processing long-distance dependencies in reading
(2020)
To make sense of a sentence, a reader must keep track of dependent relationships between words, such as between a verb and its particle (e.g. turn the music down). In languages such as German, verb-particle dependencies often span long distances, with the particle only appearing at the end of the clause. This means that it may be necessary to process a large amount of intervening sentence material before the full verb of the sentence is known. To facilitate processing, previous studies have shown that readers can preactivate the lexical information of neighbouring upcoming words, but less is known about whether such preactivation can be sustained over longer distances. We asked the question, do readers preactivate lexical information about long-distance verb particles? In one self-paced reading and one eye tracking experiment, we delayed the appearance of an obligatory verb particle that varied only in the predictability of its lexical identity. We additionally manipulated the length of the delay in order to test two contrasting accounts of dependency processing: that increased distance between dependent elements may sharpen expectation of the distant word and facilitate its processing (an antilocality effect), or that it may slow processing via temporal activation decay (a locality effect). We isolated decay by delaying the particle with a neutral noun modifier containing no information about the identity of the upcoming particle, and no known sources of interference or working memory load. Under the assumption that readers would preactivate the lexical representations of plausible verb particles, we hypothesised that a smaller number of plausible particles would lead to stronger preactivation of each particle, and thus higher predictability of the target. This in turn should have made predictable target particles more resistant to the effects of decay than less predictable target particles. The eye tracking experiment provided evidence that higher predictability did facilitate reading times, but found evidence against any effect of decay or its interaction with predictability. The self-paced reading study provided evidence against any effect of predictability or temporal decay, or their interaction. In sum, we provide evidence from eye movements that readers preactivate long-distance lexical content and that adding neutral sentence information does not induce detectable decay of this activation. The findings are consistent with accounts suggesting that delaying dependency resolution may only affect processing if the intervening information either confirms expectations or adds to working memory load, and that temporal activation decay alone may not be a major predictor of processing time.
Previous research has found that comprehenders sometimes predict information that is grammatically unlicensed by sentence constraints. An open question is why such grammatically unlicensed predictions occur. We examined the possibility that unlicensed predictions arise in situations of information conflict, for instance when comprehenders try to predict upcoming words while simultaneously building dependencies with previously encountered elements in memory.
German possessive pronouns are a good testing ground for this hypothesis because they encode two grammatically distinct agreement dependencies: a retrospective one between the possessive and its previously mentioned referent, and a prospective one between the possessive and its following nominal head. In two visual world eye-tracking experiments, we estimated the onset of predictive effects in participants' fixations.
The results showed that the retrospective dependency affected resolution of the prospective dependency by shifting the onset of predictive effects.
We attribute this effect to an interaction between predictive and memory retrieval processes.
In this paper we examine the effect of uncertainty on readers' predictions about meaning. In particular, we were interested in how uncertainty might influence the likelihood of committing to a specific sentence meaning. We conducted two event-related potential (ERP) experiments using particle verbs such as turn down and manipulated uncertainty by constraining the context such that readers could be either highly certain about the identity of a distant verb particle, such as turn the bed [...] down, or less certain due to competing particles, such as turn the music [...] up/down. The study was conducted in German, where verb particles appear clause-finally and may be separated from the verb by a large amount of material. We hypothesised that this separation would encourage readers to predict the particle, and that high certainty would make prediction of a specific particle more likely than lower certainty. If a specific particle was predicted, this would reflect a strong commitment to sentence meaning that should incur a higher processing cost if the prediction is wrong. If a specific particle was less likely to be predicted, commitment should be weaker and the processing cost of a wrong prediction lower. If true, this could suggest that uncertainty discourages predictions via an unacceptable cost-benefit ratio. However, given the clear predictions made by the literature, it was surprisingly unclear whether the uncertainty manipulation affected the two ERP components studied, the N400 and the PNP. Bayes factor analyses showed that evidence for our a priori hypothesised effect sizes was inconclusive, although there was decisive evidence against a priori hypothesised effect sizes larger than 1 mu Vfor the N400 and larger than 3 mu V for the PNP. We attribute the inconclusive finding to the properties of verb-particle dependencies that differ from the verb-noun dependencies in which the N400 and PNP are often studied.
In this paper we examine the effect of uncertainty on readers’ predictions about meaning. In particular, we were interested in how uncertainty might influence the likelihood of committing to a specific sentence meaning. We conducted two event-related potential (ERP) experiments using particle verbs such as turn down and manipulated uncertainty by constraining the context such that readers could be either highly certain about the identity of a distant verb particle, such as turn the bed […] down, or less certain due to competing particles, such as turn the music […] up/down. The study was conducted in German, where verb particles appear clause-finally and may be separated from the verb by a large amount of material. We hypothesised that this separation would encourage readers to predict the particle, and that high certainty would make prediction of a specific particle more likely than lower certainty. If a specific particle was predicted, this would reflect a strong commitment to sentence meaning that should incur a higher processing cost if the prediction is wrong. If a specific particle was less likely to be predicted, commitment should be weaker and the processing cost of a wrong prediction lower. If true, this could suggest that uncertainty discourages predictions via an unacceptable cost-benefit ratio. However, given the clear predictions made by the literature, it was surprisingly unclear whether the uncertainty manipulation affected the two ERP components studied, the N400 and the PNP. Bayes factor analyses showed that evidence for our a priori hypothesised effect sizes was inconclusive, although there was decisive evidence against a priori hypothesised effect sizes larger than 1μV for the N400 and larger than 3μV for the PNP. We attribute the inconclusive finding to the properties of verb-particle dependencies that differ from the verb-noun dependencies in which the N400 and PNP are often studied.
Intuitively, strongly constraining contexts should lead to stronger probabilistic representations of sentences in memory. Encountering unexpected words could therefore be expected to trigger costlier shifts in these representations than expected words. However, psycholinguistic measures commonly used to study probabilistic processing, such as the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, are sensitive to word predictability but not to contextual constraint. Some research suggests that constraint-related processing cost may be measurable via an ERP positivity following the N400, known as the anterior post-N400 positivity (PNP). The PNP is argued to reflect update of a sentence representation and to be distinct from the posterior P600, which reflects conflict detection and reanalysis. However, constraint-related PNP findings are inconsistent. We sought to conceptually replicate Federmeier et al. (2007) and Kuperberg et al. (2020), who observed that the PNP, but not the N400 or the P600, was affected by constraint at unexpected but plausible words. Using a pre-registered design and statistical approach maximising power, we demonstrated a dissociated effect of predictability and constraint: strong evidence for predictability but not constraint in the N400 window, and strong evidence for constraint but not predictability in the later window. However, the constraint effect was consistent with a P600 and not a PNP, suggesting increased conflict between a strong representation and unexpected input rather than greater update of the representation. We conclude that either a simple strong/weak constraint design is not always sufficient to elicit the PNP, or that previous PNP constraint findings could be an artifact of smaller sample size.
Intuitively, strongly constraining contexts should lead to stronger probabilistic representations of sentences in memory. Encountering unexpected words could therefore be expected to trigger costlier shifts in these representations than expected words. However, psycholinguistic measures commonly used to study probabilistic processing, such as the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, are sensitive to word predictability but not to contextual constraint. Some research suggests that constraint-related processing cost may be measurable via an ERP positivity following the N400, known as the anterior post-N400 positivity (PNP). The PNP is argued to reflect update of a sentence representation and to be distinct from the posterior P600, which reflects conflict detection and reanalysis. However, constraint-related PNP findings are inconsistent. We sought to conceptually replicate Federmeier et al. (2007) and Kuperberg et al. (2020), who observed that the PNP, but not the N400 or the P600, was affected by constraint at unexpected but plausible words. Using a pre-registered design and statistical approach maximising power, we demonstrated a dissociated effect of predictability and constraint: strong evidence for predictability but not constraint in the N400 window, and strong evidence for constraint but not predictability in the later window. However, the constraint effect was consistent with a P600 and not a PNP, suggesting increased conflict between a strong representation and unexpected input rather than greater update of the representation. We conclude that either a simple strong/weak constraint design is not always sufficient to elicit the PNP, or that previous PNP constraint findings could be an artifact of smaller sample size.
Deep learning is a sub-field of machine learning that has recently gained substantial popularity in various domains such as computer vision, automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, and bioinformatics. Deep-learning techniques are able to learn complex feature representations from raw signals and thus also have potential to improve signal processing in the context of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, they typically require large amounts of data for training - much more than what can often be provided with reasonable effort when working with brain activity recordings of any kind. In order to still leverage the power of deep-learning techniques with limited available data, special care needs to be taken when designing the BCI task, defining the structure of the deep model, and choosing the training method. This chapter presents example approaches for the specific scenario of music-based brain-computer interaction through electroencephalography - in the hope that these will prove to be valuable in different settings as well. We explain important decisions for the design of the BCI task and their impact on the models and training techniques that can be used. Furthermore, we present and compare various pre-training techniques that aim to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Finally, we discuss approaches to interpret the trained models.
Bienenfresserortungsversuch
(2019)