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Prediction is often regarded as a central and domain-general aspect of cognition. This proposal extends to language, where predictive processing might enable the comprehension of rapidly unfolding input by anticipating upcoming words or their semantic features. To make these predictions, the brain needs to form a representation of the predictive patterns in the environment. Predictive processing theories suggest a continuous learning process that is driven by prediction errors, but much is still to be learned about this mechanism in language comprehension. This thesis therefore combined three electroencephalography (EEG) experiments to explore the relationship between prediction and implicit learning at the level of meaning.
Results from Study 1 support the assumption that the brain constantly infers und updates probabilistic representations of the semantic context, potentially across multiple levels of complexity. N400 and P600 brain potentials could be predicted by semantic surprise based on a probabilistic estimate of previous exposure and a more complex probability representation, respectively.
Subsequent work investigated the influence of prediction errors on the update of semantic predictions during sentence comprehension. In line with error-based learning, unexpected sentence continuations in Study 2 ¬– characterized by large N400 amplitudes ¬– were associated with increased implicit memory compared to expected continuations. Further, Study 3 indicates that prediction errors not only strengthen the representation of the unexpected word, but also update specific predictions made from the respective sentence context. The study additionally provides initial evidence that the amount of unpredicted information as reflected in N400 amplitudes drives this update of predictions, irrespective of the strength of the original incorrect prediction.
Together, these results support a central assumption of predictive processing theories: A probabilistic predictive representation at the level of meaning that is updated by prediction errors. They further propose the N400 ERP component as a possible learning signal. The results also emphasize the need for further research regarding the role of the late positive ERP components in error-based learning. The continuous error-based adaptation described in this thesis allows the brain to improve its predictive representation with the aim to make better predictions in the future.
Mental health of Japanese workers: amotivation mediates self-compassion on mental health problems
(2022)
Workplace mental health is a cause for concern in many countries. Globally, 78% of the workforce experienced impairment of their mental health in 2020. In Japan, more than half of employees are mentally distressed.
Previously, research has identified that self-compassion (i.e., being kind and understanding towards oneself) and work motivation were important to their mental health.
However, how these three components relate to each other remains to be elucidated. Accordingly, this study aimed to examine the relationship between mental health problems, self-compassion and work motivation (i.e., intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and amotivation).
A cross-sectional design was employed, where 165 Japanese workers completed self-report scales regarding those three components. A correlation and path analyses were conducted.
Mental health problems were positively associated with amotivation and negatively associated with age and self-compassion. While intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation did not mediate the impact of self-compassion on mental health problems, amotivation did.
The findings can help managers and organizational psychologists help identify effective approaches to improving work mental health.
This book provides a novel analysis for the syntax of the clausal left periphery, focusing on various finite clause types and especially on embedded clauses. It investigates how the appearance of multiple projections interacts with economy principles and with the need for marking syntactic information overtly. In particular, the proposed account shows that a flexible approach assuming only a minimal number of projections is altogether favourable to cartographic approaches. The main focus of the book is on West Germanic, in particular on English and German, yet other Germanic and non-Germanic languages are also discussed for comparative purposes.
The ‘social brain’, consisting of areas sensitive to social information, supposedly gates the mechanisms involved in human language learning. Early preverbal interactions are guided by ostensive signals, such as gaze patterns, which are coordinated across body, brain, and environment. However, little is known about how the infant brain processes social gaze in naturalistic interactions and how this relates to infant language development. During free-play of 9-month-olds with their mothers, we recorded hemodynamic cortical activity of ´social brain` areas (prefrontal cortex, temporo-parietal junctions) via fNIRS, and micro-coded mother’s and infant’s social gaze. Infants’ speech processing was assessed with a word segmentation task. Using joint recurrence quantification analysis, we examined the connection between infants’ ´social brain` activity and the temporal dynamics of social gaze at intrapersonal (i.e., infant’s coordination, maternal coordination) and interpersonal (i.e., dyadic coupling) levels. Regression modeling revealed that intrapersonal dynamics in maternal social gaze (but not infant’s coordination or dyadic coupling) coordinated significantly with infant’s cortical activity. Moreover, recurrence quantification analysis revealed that intrapersonal maternal social gaze dynamics (in terms of entropy) were the best predictor of infants’ word segmentation. The findings support the importance of social interaction in language development, particularly highlighting maternal social gaze dynamics.
Rhythmicity characterizes both interpersonal synchrony and spoken language. Emotions and language are forms of interpersonal communication, which interact with each other throughout development. We investigated whether and how emotional synchrony between mothers and their 9-month-old infants relates to infants' word segmentation as an early marker of language development. Twenty-six 9-month-old infants and their German-speaking mothers took part in the study. To measure emotional synchrony, we coded positive, neutral and negative emotional expressions of the mothers and their infants during a free play session. We then calculated the degree to which the mothers' and their infants' matching emotional expressions followed a predictable pattern. To measure word segmentation, we familiarized infants with auditory text passages and tested how long they looked at the screen while listening to familiar versus novel words. We found that higher levels of predictability (i.e. low entropy) during mother-infant interaction is associated with infants' word segmentation performance. These findings suggest that individual differences in word segmentation relate to the complexity and predictability of emotional expressions during mother-infant interactions.
Purpose: Coarticulatory effects in speech vary across development, but the sources of this variation remain unclear. This study investigated whether developmental differences in intrasyllabic coarticulation degree could be explained by differences in children's articulatory patterns compared to adults.
Method: To address this question, we first compared the tongue configurations of 3-to 7-year-old German children to those of adults. The observed developmental differences were then examined through simulations with Task Dynamics Application, a Task Dynamics simulation system, to establish which articulatory modifications could best reproduce the empirical results. To generate syllables simulating the lack of tongue gesture differentiation, we tested three simulation scenarios.
Results: We found that younger speakers use less differentiated articulatory patterns to achieve alveolar constrictions than adults. The simulations corresponding to undifferentiated control of tongue tip and tongue body resulted in (a) tongue shapes similar to those observed in natural speech and (b) higher degrees of intrasyllabic coarticulation in children when compared to adults.
Conclusions: Results provide evidence that differences in articulatory patterns contribute to developmental differences in coarticulation degree. This study further shows that empirically informed modeling can advance our understanding of changes in coarticulatory patterns across age.
More than 30 years have passed since Mehler et al. (1988) proposed that newborns can discriminate between languages that belong to different rhythm classes: stress-, syllable- or mora-timed. Thereupon they developed the hypothesis that infants are sensitive to differences in vowel and consonant interval durations as acoustic correlates of rhythm classes. It remains unknown exactly which durational computations infants use when perceiving speech for the purposes of distinguishing languages. Here, a meta-analysis of studies on infants' language discrimination skills over the first year of life was conducted, aiming to quantify how language discrimination skills change with age and are modulated by rhythm classes or durational metrics. A systematic literature search identified 42 studies that tested infants' (birth to 12 months) discrimination or preference of two language varieties, by presenting infants with auditory or audio-visual continuous speech. Quantitative data synthesis was conducted using multivariate random effects meta-analytic models with the factors rhythm class difference, age, stimulus manipulation, method, and metrics operationalising proportions of and variability in vowel and consonant interval durations, to explore which factors best account for language discrimination or preference. Results revealed that smaller differences in vowel interval variability (oV) and larger differences in successive consonantal interval variability (rPVI-C) were associated with more successful language discrimination, and better accounted for discrimination results than the factor rhythm class. There were no effects of age for discrimination but results on preference studies were affected by age: the older infants get, the more they prefer non-native languages that are rhythmically similar to their native language, but not non-native languages that are rhythmically distinct. These findings can inform theories on language discrimination that have previously focussed on rhythm class, by providing a novel way to operationalise rhythm in language in the extent to which it accounts for infants' language discrimination abilities.
Formal constraints on crossing dependencies have played a large role in research on the formal complexity of natural language grammars and parsing. Here we ask whether the apparent evidence for constraints on crossing dependencies in treebanks might arise because of independent constraints on trees, such as low arity and dependency length minimization. We address this question using two sets of experiments. In Experiment 1, we compare the distribution of formal properties of crossing dependencies, such as gap degree, between real trees and baseline trees matched for rate of crossing dependencies and various other properties. In Experiment 2, we model whether two dependencies cross, given certain psycholinguistic properties of the dependencies. We find surprisingly weak evidence for constraints originating from the mild context-sensitivity literature (gap degree and well-nestedness) beyond what can be explained by constraints on rate of crossing dependencies, topological properties of the trees, and dependency length. However, measures that have emerged from the parsing literature (e.g., edge degree, end-point crossings, and heads' depth difference) differ strongly between real and random trees. Modeling results show that cognitive metrics relating to information locality and working-memory limitations affect whether two dependencies cross or not, but they do not fully explain the distribution of crossing dependencies in natural languages. Together these results suggest that crossing constraints are better characterized by processing pressures than by mildly context-sensitive constraints.
Развитие науки, общества и медицины ведет за собой неуклонный рост средней продолжительности жизни. В результате наука сталкивается с новыми задачами, в число которых входит предотвращение деменции и поддержание эффективной работоспособности мозга при старении человека. Одним из защитных факторов, предотвращающих ослабление когнитивных функций и поддерживающих нейропластичность мозга, является билингвизм.
Однако дебаты насчет нейропротекторных свойств двуязычия до сих пор являются актуальными. В данной статье рассмотрен феномен нейрокогнитивного резерва (НКР) и определена взаимосвязь между билингвизмом и такими составляющими НКР, как мозговой резерв, нейрональный резерв и нейрональная компенсация.
Кроме этого, в статье приведен обзор исследований, посвященных изучению нейронных и когнитивных механизмов влияния билингвизма на здоровое функционирование мозга при старении. В заключении мы вкратце остановились на том, каким образом двуязычие может защищать мозг от старения благодаря взаимодействию между мозговыми и когнитивными составляющими НКР.
The acquisition of clitics still remains a highly controversial issue in Greek acquisition literature despite the bulk of studies performed.
Object clitics have been shown to be early acquired by monolingual children in terms of production rates, whereas only highly proficient bilingual children achieve target-like performance.
Crucially, errors in gender marking are persistent for monolingual and bilingual children even when adult-like production rates are achieved.
This study aims to readdress the acquisition of clitics in an innovative way, by entering the variable of gender in an experimental design targeting to assess production and processing by bilingual and monolingual children.
Moreover, we examined the role of language proficiency (in terms of general verbal intelligence and syntactic production abilities). The groups had comparable performance in both tasks (in terms of correct responses and error distribution in production and reaction times in comprehension).
However, verbal intelligence had an effect on the performance of the monolingual but not of the bilingual group in the production task, and bilingual children were overall slower in the comprehension task. Syntactic production abilities did not have any effect. We argue that gender marking affects clitic processing, and we discuss the implications of our findings for bilingual acquisition.
Turkish 3rd person plural subjects are frequently used with verbs that are unmarked for number, with plural suffix omission influenced by semantic and word-order related constraints.
Previous findings from judgment tasks indicate that monolingual and heritage Turkish speakers differ in the way they are affected by these constraints.
This study builds and expands upon previous research by investigating the role of word order in more detail, and by examining whether the constraint weightings obtained from Uygun and Felser's (2021) acceptability judgment data are able to predict speakers' verb form choices in a timed sentence completion task.
Besides confirming that word-order related constraints are information-structural in nature, our results show that heritage speakers over-produce plural-marked verbs in comparison to monolingual speakers, indicating between-group differences in constraint ranking.
We interpret this as reflecting a tendency among Turkish heritage speakers to regularize the agreement system, which is not necessarily observed in metalinguistic judgment tasks.
A special class of English words with tense vowel/diphthong nuclei and liquid codas receive variable syllable count judgments (one and over-one syllables).
Tilsen and Cohn (2016) showed that differences in judgments correlate with differences in production, supporting their hypothesis that meta-phonological judgments and speech motor control share a common representation.
In the present study, we further propose that syllable count judgments are related to subsegmental representation in the rime, and are independent of acoustic duration.
We test the hypothesis by comparing English and German, chosen for their similar word structures and vowel length contrast, and their crucial difference in the gestural specification of coda liquids.
In English, coda liquids have an earlier vocalic gesture relative to the consonantal one, while in German, both gestures are simultaneous.
We stipulated that sesquisyllabic (over-one) judgments are related to the count of sequentially-timed vocalic gestures in the rime. The difference in the coda liquid composition between the two languages predicts that sesquisyllables should not emerge in German.
Our predictions were confirmed by the results of parallel production (acoustic) and syllable count judgment experiments in English and German.
We propose a model accounting for these results, and we discuss its typological implications and its limitations.
Production and comprehension of prosodic boundary marking in persons with unilateral brain lesions
(2022)
Purpose: Persons with unilateral brain damage in the right hemisphere (RH) or left hemisphere (LH) show limitations in processing linguistic prosody, with yet inconclusive results on their ability to process prosodically marked structural boundaries for syntactic ambiguity resolution. We aimed at systematically investigating production and comprehension of three prosodic cues (f(0) range, final lengthening, and pause) at structural boundaries in coordinate sequences in participants with right hemisphere brain damage (RHDP) and participants with left hemisphere brain damage (LHDP). Method: Twenty RHDP and 15 LHDP participated in our study.
Comprehension experiment: Participants and a control group listened to coordinate name sequences with internal grouping by a prosodically marked structural boundary (grouped condition, e.g., "(Gabi und Leni) # und Nina") or without internal grouping (ungrouped condition, e.g., "Gabi und Leni und Nina") and had to identify the target condition. The strength and combinations of prosodic cues in the stimuli were manipulated.
Production experiment: Participants were asked to produce coordinate sequences in the two conditions (grouped, ungrouped) in two different tasks: a Reading Aloud and a Repetition experiment. Accuracy of participants' productions was subsequently assessed in a rating study and productions were analyzed with respect to use of prosodic cues.
Results: In the Comprehension experiment, RHDP and LHDP had overall lower identification accuracies than unimpaired control participants and LHDP were found to have particular problems with boundary identification when the pause cue was reduced. In production, LHDP and RHDP employed all three prosodic cues for boundary marking, but struggled to clearly mark prosodic boundaries in 28% of all productions. Both groups showed better performance in reading aloud than in repetition. LHDP relied more on using f(0) range and pause duration to prosodically mark structural boundaries, whereas RHDP employed final lengthening more vigorously than LHDP in reading aloud.
Conclusions: We conclude that processing of linguistic prosody is affected in RHDP and LHDP, but not completely impaired. Therefore, prosody can serve as a relevant communicative resource. However, it should also be considered as a target area for assessment and treatment in both groups.
Our original target article highlighted some significant shortcomings in the current state of child language research: a large skew in our evidential base towards English and a handful of other Indo-European languages that partly has its origins in a lack of researcher diversity.
In this article, we respond to the 21 commentaries on our original article.
The commentaries highlighted both the importance of attention to typological features of languages and the environments and contexts in which languages are acquired, with many commentators providing concrete suggestions on how we address the data skew.
In this response, we synthesise the main themes of the commentaries and make suggestions for how the field can move towards both improving data coverage and opening up to traditionally under-represented researchers.
There is consensus that word retrieval starts with activation of semantic representations.
However, in adults without language impairment, relatively little attention has been paid to the effects of the semantic attributes of to-be-retrieved words.
This paper, therefore, addresses the question of which item-inherent semantic factors influence word retrieval.
Specifically, it reviews the literature on a selection of these factors: imageability, concreteness, number of semantic features, typicality, intercorrelational density, featural distinctiveness, concept distinctiveness, animacy, semantic neighbourhood density, semantic similarity, operativity, valence, and arousal.
It highlights several methodological challenges in this field, and has a focus on the insights from studies with people with aphasia where the effects of these variables are more prevalent.
The paper concludes that further research simultaneously examining the effects of different semantic factors that are likely to affect lexical co-activation, and the interaction of these variables, would be fruitful, as would suitably scaled computational modelling of these effects in unimpaired language processing and in language impairment.
Such research would enable the refinement of theories of semantic processing and word production, and potentially have implications for diagnosis and treatment of semantic and lexical impairments.
Adverbial connectives like therefore, which link a preceding 'external' to an 'internal' argument, can be regarded as anaphoric: The external argument is selected by an interpretation process akin to that of an event anaphor, and intervening material can appear between both arguments.
We report on a crowdsourcing experiment on the German connectives trotzdem and dennoch that studies factors that lead readers to assume such long-distance arguments: semantic plausibility of intervening material, 'subjective' versus 'objective' content, and the presence of an anaphoric morpheme in the connective.
We find that the type and content of the intervening material play an important role in argument choice.
Proceedings of TripleA 10
(2024)
The TripleA workshop series was founded in 2014 by linguists from Potsdam and Tübingen with the aim of providing a platform for researchers that conduct theoretically-informed linguistic fieldwork on meaning. Its focus is particularly on languages that are under-represented in the current research landscape, including but not limited to languages of Africa, Asia, and Australia, hence TripleA.
For its 10th anniversary, TripleA returned to the University of Potsdam on the 7-9th of June 2023.
The programme included 21 talks dealing with no less than 22 different languages, including three invited talks given by Sihwei Chen (Academia Sinica), Jérémy Pasquereau (Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes, CNRS) and Agata Renans (Ruhr-Universität Bochum). Nine of these (invited or peer-reviewed) talks are featured in this volume.
We investigate the variation in oral and written language in terms of anaphoric distance (i.e., the textual distance between anaphors and their antecedents), expanding corpus-based research with experimental evidence.
Contrastive corpus studies demonstrate that oral genres include longer average anaphoric distance than written genres, if the distance is measured in terms of clauses (Fox, 1987; Aktas & Stede, 2020).
We designed an experiment in order to examine the contrasts in oral and written mediums, using the same genre.
We aim to gain more insight about the impact of the medium, in a situation where both mediums convey a similar level of spontaneity, informality and interactivity. We designed a story continuation study, where the participants are recruited via crowdsourcing.
To our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind, where anaphoric distance is manipulated systematically in a language production experiment in order to examine medium distinctions.
We observed that participants use more pronouns in oral medium than in written medium if the anaphoric distance is long.
This result is in line with the implications of the earlier corpus-based research. In addition, our results indicate that anaphoric distance has a larger effect in referential choice for the written medium.
Introduction Early linguistic background, and in particular, access to language, lays the foundation of future reading skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing signers. The current study aims to estimate the impact of two factors – early access to sign and/or spoken language – on reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult Russian Sign Language speakers.
Methods In the eye-tracking experiment, 26 deaf and 14 hard-of-hearing native Russian Sign Language speakers read 144 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus. Analysis of global eye-movement trajectories (scanpaths) was used to identify clusters of typical reading trajectories. The role of early access to sign and spoken language as well as vocabulary size as predictors of the more fluent reading pattern was tested.
Results Hard-of-hearing signers with early access to sign language read more fluently than those who were exposed to sign language later in life or deaf signers without access to speech sounds. No association between early access to spoken language and reading fluency was found.
Discussion Our results suggest a unique advantage for the hard-of-hearing individuals from having early access to both sign and spoken language and support the existing claims that early exposure to sign language is beneficial not only for deaf but also for hard-of-hearing children.
Introduction LingoTalk is a German speech-language app designed to enhance lexical retrieval in individuals with aphasia. It incorporates automatic speech recognition (ASR) to provide therapist-independent feedback. The execution and effectiveness of a self-administered intervention with LingoTalk was explored in a case series study.
Methods Three individuals with chronic aphasia participated in a highly individualized, supervised self-administered intervention lasting 3 weeks. The LingoTalk app closely monitored the frequency, intensity and progress of the intervention. Treatment efficacy was assessed using a multiple baseline design, examining both item-specific treatment effects and generalization to untreated items, an untreated task, and spontaneous speech.
Results All participants successfully completed the intervention with LingoTalk, although one participant was not able to use the ASR feature. None of the participants fully adhered to the treatment protocol. All participants demonstrated significant and sustained improvement in the naming of practiced items, although there was limited evidence of generalization. Additionally, there was a slight reduction in word-finding difficulties during spontaneous speech.
Discussion This small-scale study indicates that self-administered intervention with LingoTalk can improve oral naming of treated items. Thus, it has the potential to complement face-to-face speech-language therapy, such as within in a “flipped speech room” approach. The choice of feedback mode is discussed. Transparent progress monitoring of the intervention appears to positively influence patients' motivation.
Linguistic structure modulates attention in reading: evidence from negative concord in Italian
(2023)
We report the reading performance of an Italian speaker with egocentric Neglect Dyslexia on sentences with Negative Concord structures, which contain a linguistic cue to the presence of a preceding negative marker and compare it to sentences with no such cue. As predicted, the frequency of reading the whole sentence, including the initial negative marker non, was higher in Negative Concord structures than in sentences which also started with non, but crucially, lacked the medially positioned linguistic cue to the presence of non.
These data support the claim that the presence of linguistic cues to sentence structure modulates attention during reading in Neglect Dyslexia.
This thesis explores word order variability in verb-final languages. Verb-final languages have a reputation for a high amount of word order variability. However, that reputation amounts to an urban myth due to a lack of systematic investigation. This thesis provides such a systematic investigation by presenting original data from several verb-final languages with a focus on four Uralic ones: Estonian, Udmurt, Meadow Mari, and South Sámi. As with every urban myth, there is a kernel of truth in that many unrelated verb-final languages share a particular kind of word order variability, A-scrambling, in which the fronted elements do not receive a special information-structural role, such as topic or contrastive focus. That word order variability goes hand in hand with placing focussed phrases further to the right in the position directly in front of the verb. Variations on this pattern are exemplified by Uyghur, Standard Dargwa, Eastern Armenian, and three of the Uralic languages, Estonian, Udmurt, and Meadow Mari. So far for the kernel of truth, but the fourth Uralic language, South Sámi, is comparably rigid and does not feature this particular kind of word order variability. Further such comparably rigid, non-scrambling verb-final languages are Dutch, Afrikaans, Amharic, and Korean. In contrast to scrambling languages, non-scrambling languages feature obligatory subject movement, causing word order rigidity next to other typical EPP effects.
The EPP is a defining feature of South Sámi clause structure in general. South Sámi exhibits a one-of-a-kind alternation between SOV and SAuxOV order that is captured by the assumption of the EPP and obligatory movement of auxiliaries but not lexical verbs. Other languages that allow for SAuxOV order either lack an alternation because the auxiliary is obligatorily present (Macro-Sudan SAuxOVX languages), or feature an alternation between SVO and SAuxOV (Kru languages; V2 with underlying OV as a fringe case). In the SVO–SAuxOV languages, both auxiliaries and lexical verbs move. Hence, South Sámi shows that the textbook difference between the VO languages English and French, whether verb movement is restricted to auxiliaries, also extends to OV languages. SAuxOV languages are an outlier among OV languages in general but are united by the presence of the EPP.
Word order variability is not restricted to the preverbal field in verb-final languages, as most of them feature postverbal elements (PVE). PVE challenge the notion of verb-finality in a language. Strictly verb-final languages without any clause-internal PVE are rare. This thesis charts the first structural and descriptive typology of PVE. Verb-final languages vary in the categories they allow as PVE. Allowing for non-oblique PVE is a pivotal threshold: when non-oblique PVE are allowed, PVE can be used for information-structural effects. Many areally and genetically unrelated languages only allow for given PVE but differ in whether the PVE are contrastive. In those languages, verb-finality is not at stake since verb-medial orders are marked. In contrast, the Uralic languages Estonian and Udmurt allow for any PVE, including information focus. Verb-medial orders can be used in the same contexts as verb-final orders without semantic and pragmatic differences. As such, verb placement is subject to actual free variation. The underlying verb-finality of Estonian and Udmurt can only be inferred from a range of diagnostics indicating optional verb movement in both languages. In general, it is not possible to account for PVE with a uniform analysis: rightwards merge, leftward verb movement, and rightwards phrasal movement are required to capture the cross- and intralinguistic variation.
Knowing that a language is verb-final does not allow one to draw conclusions about word order variability in that language. There are patterns of homogeneity, such as the word order variability driven by directly preverbal focus and the givenness of postverbal elements, but those are not brought about by verb-finality alone. Preverbal word order variability is restricted by the more abstract property of obligatory subject movement, whereas the determinant of postverbal word order variability has to be determined in the future.
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 Final-over-Final Condition has emerged as a robust and explanatory generalization for a wide range of phenomena (Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts 2014, Sheehan et al. 2017).
In this article, we argue that it also holds in another domain, nominalization.
In languages that show overt nominalization of VPs, one word order is routinely unattested, namely, a head-initial VP with a suffixal nominalizer.
This typological gap can be accounted for by the Final-over-Final Condition, if we allow it to hold within mixed extended projections.
This view also makes correct predictions about agentive nominalizations and nominalized serial verb constructions.
This study provides a synthesis of corpus-based and experimental investigations of word-order preferences in German infinitival complementation. We carried out a systematic analysis of present-day German corpora to establish frequency distributions of different word-order options: extraposition, intraposition, and 'third construction'. We then examined, firstly, whether and to what extent corpus frequencies and processing economy constraints can predict the acceptability of these three word-order variants, and whether subject raising and subject control verbs form clearly distinguishable subclasses of infinitive-embedding verbs in terms of their word-order behaviour. Secondly, our study looks into the issue of coherence by comparing acceptability ratings for monoclausal coherent and biclausal incoherent construals of intraposed infinitives, and by examining whether a biclausal incoherent analysis gives rise to local and/or global processing difficulty. Taken together, our results revealed that (i) whilst the extraposition pattern consistently wins out over all other word-order variants for control verbs, neither frequency nor processing-based approaches to word-order variation can account for the acceptability of low-frequency variants, (ii) there is considerable verb-specific variation regarding word-order preferences both between and within the two sets of raising and control verbs under investigation, and (iii) although monoclausal coherent intraposition is rated above biclausal incoherent intraposition, the latter is not any more difficult to process than the former. Our findings indicate that frequency of occurrence and processing-related constraints interact with idiosyncratic lexical properties of individual verbs in determining German speakers' structural preferences.
The ZuCo benchmark on cross-subject reading task classification with EEG and eye-tracking data
(2023)
We present a new machine learning benchmark for reading task classification with the goal of advancing EEG and eye-tracking research at the intersection between computational language processing and cognitive neuroscience. The benchmark task consists of a cross-subject classification to distinguish between two reading paradigms: normal reading and task-specific reading. The data for the benchmark is based on the Zurich Cognitive Language Processing Corpus (ZuCo 2.0), which provides simultaneous eye-tracking and EEG signals from natural reading of English sentences. The training dataset is publicly available, and we present a newly recorded hidden testset. We provide multiple solid baseline methods for this task and discuss future improvements. We release our code and provide an easy-to-use interface to evaluate new approaches with an accompanying public leaderboard: .
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.
Studies on French adults using a written lexical decision task with masked priming, in which targets were more primed by consonant- (jalu-JOLI) than vowel-related (vobi-JOLI) primes, support the proposal that consonants have more weight than vowels in lexical processing.
This study examines the phonological and/or lexical nature of this consonant bias
(C-bias), using a sandwich priming task in which a brief presentation of the target
(pre-prime) precedes the prime-target sequence, a manipulation blocking lexical neighbourhood effects.
Results from three experiments (varying pre-prime/prime durations) show consistent
C-priming and no significant V-priming at earlier and later processing stages (50 or 66 ms primes).
Yet, a joint analysis reveals a small V-priming, while confirming a significant consonant advantage.
This demonstrates the contribution of the phonological level to the C-bias.
Second, differences in performance comparing the classic versus sandwich priming task also establish a contribution of lexical neighbourhood inhibition effects to the C-bias.
We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds.
We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas.
(1) We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics.
(2) We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker.
(3) In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language.
Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars.
Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike.
Classical linguistic theory assumes that formal aspects, like sound, are not internally related to the meaning of words. However, recent research suggests language might code affective meaning such as threat and alert sublexically. Positing affective phonological iconicity as a systematic organization principle of the German lexicon, we calculated sublexical affective values for sub-syllabic phonological word segments from a large-scale affective lexical German database by averaging valence and arousal ratings of all words any phonological segment appears in. We tested word stimuli with either consistent or inconsistent mappings between lexical affective meaning and sublexical affective values (negative-valence/high-arousal vs. neutral-valence/lowarousal) in an EEG visual-lexical-decision task. A mismatch between sublexical and lexical affective values elicited an increased N400 response. These results reveal that systematic affective phonological iconicity - extracted from the lexicon - impacts the extraction of lexical word meaning during reading.
Stimulus data and experimental design for a self-paced reading study on emoji-word substitutions
(2022)
This data paper presents the experimental design and stimuli from an online self-paced reading study on the processing of emojis substituting lexically ambiguous nouns. We recorded reading times for the target ambiguous nouns and for emojis depicting either the intended target referent or a contextually inappropriate homophonous noun. Furthermore, we recorded comprehension accuracy, demographics and a self-assessment of the participants' emoji usage frequency. The data includes all stimuli used, the raw data, the full JavaScript code for the online experiment, as well as Python and R code for the data analysis. We believe that our dataset may give important insights related to the comprehension mechanisms involved in the cognitive processing of emojis. For interpretation and discussion of the experiment, please see the original article entitled "The processing of emoji-word substitutions: A self-paced-reading study".
In this paper, we employ an experimental paradigm using insights from the psychology of reasoning to investigate the question whether certain modals generate and draw attention to alternatives. The article extends and builds on the methodology and findings of Mascarenhas & Picat (2019). Based on experimental results, they argue that the English epistemic modal might raises alternatives. We apply the same methodology to the English modal allowed to to test different hypotheses regarding the involvement of alternatives in deontic modality. We find commonalities and differences between the two modals we tested. We discuss theoretical consequences for existing semantic analyses of these modals, and argue that reasoning tasks can serve as a diagnostic tool to discover which natural language expressions involve alternatives.
In the picture-word interference paradigm, participants name pictures while ignoring a written or spoken distractor word. Naming times to the pictures are slowed down by the presence of the distractor word. The present study investigates in detail the impact of distractor and target word properties on picture naming times, building on the seminal study by Miozzo and Caramazza. We report the results of several Bayesian meta-analyses based on 26 datasets. These analyses provide estimates of effect sizes and their precision for several variables and their interactions. They show the reliability of the distractor frequency effect on picture naming latencies (latencies decrease as the frequency of the distractor increases) and demonstrate for the first time the impact of distractor length, with longer naming latencies for trials with longer distractors. Moreover, distractor frequency interacts with target word frequency to predict picture naming latencies. The methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
How tone, intonation and emotion shape the development of infants' fundamental frequency perception
(2022)
Fundamental frequency (integral(0)), perceived as pitch, is the first and arguably most salient auditory component humans are exposed to since the beginning of life.
It carries multiple linguistic (e.g., word meaning) and paralinguistic (e.g., speakers' emotion) functions in speech and communication.
The mappings between these functions and integral(0) features vary within a language and differ cross-linguistically. For instance, a rising pitch can be perceived as a question in English but a lexical tone in Mandarin. Such variations mean that infants must learn the specific mappings based on their respective linguistic and social environments.
To date, canonical theoretical frameworks and most empirical studies do not view or consider the multi-functionality of integral(0), but typically focus on individual functions. More importantly, despite the eventual mastery of integral(0) in communication, it is unclear how infants learn to decompose and recognize these overlapping functions carried by integral(0). In this paper, we review the symbioses and synergies of the lexical, intonational, and emotional functions that can be carried by integral(0) and are being acquired throughout infancy.
On the basis of our review, we put forward the Learnability Hypothesis that infants decompose and acquire multiple integral(0) functions through native/environmental experiences. Under this hypothesis, we propose representative cases such as the synergy scenario, where infants use visual cues to disambiguate and decompose the different integral(0) functions. Further, viable ways to test the scenarios derived from this hypothesis are suggested across auditory and visual modalities.
Discovering how infants learn to master the diverse functions carried by integral(0) can increase our understanding of linguistic systems, auditory processing and communication functions.
Inferences about hypotheses are ubiquitous in the cognitive sciences. Bayes factors provide one general way to compare different hypotheses by their compatibility with the observed data. Those quantifications can then also be used to choose between hypotheses. While Bayes factors provide an immediate approach to hypothesis testing, they are highly sensitive to details of the data/model assumptions and it's unclear whether the details of the computational implementation (such as bridge sampling) are unbiased for complex analyses. Hem, we study how Bayes factors misbehave under different conditions. This includes a study of errors in the estimation of Bayes factors; the first-ever use of simulation-based calibration to test the accuracy and bias of Bayes factor estimates using bridge sampling; a study of the stability of Bayes factors against different MCMC draws and sampling variation in the data; and a look at the variability of decisions based on Bayes factors using a utility function. We outline a Bayes factor workflow that researchers can use to study whether Bayes factors are robust for their individual analysis. Reproducible code is available from haps://osf.io/y354c/. <br /> Translational Abstract <br /> In psychology and related areas, scientific hypotheses are commonly tested by asking questions like "is [some] effect present or absent." Such hypothesis testing is most often carried out using frequentist null hypothesis significance testing (NIIST). The NHST procedure is very simple: It usually returns a p-value, which is then used to make binary decisions like "the effect is present/abscnt." For example, it is common to see studies in the media that draw simplistic conclusions like "coffee causes cancer," or "coffee reduces the chances of geuing cancer." However, a powerful and more nuanced alternative approach exists: Bayes factors. Bayes factors have many advantages over NHST. However, for the complex statistical models that arc commonly used for data analysis today, computing Bayes factors is not at all a simple matter. In this article, we discuss the main complexities associated with computing Bayes factors. This is the first article to provide a detailed workflow for understanding and computing Bayes factors in complex statistical models. The article provides a statistically more nuanced way to think about hypothesis testing than the overly simplistic tendency to declare effects as being "present" or "absent".
Background:
Aphasia therapy software applications (apps) can help achieve recommendations regarding aphasia treatment intensity and duration.
However, we currently know very little about speech and language therapists' (SLTs) preferences with regards to these apps.
This may be problematic, as clinician acceptance of novel treatments and technology are a key factor for successful translation from research evidence to practice.
Aim:
This research aimed to increase our understanding of clinicians' experiences with aphasia therapy apps and their perceived barriers and facilitators to the use of aphasia apps. Furthermore, we wanted to explore the influence of some demographic factors (age, country, and SLT availability in the client's hometown) on SLTs' attitudes towards these apps.
Method & Procedures:
35 Dutch and 29 Australian SLTs completed an online survey. The survey contained 9 closed-ended questions and 3 open-ended questions. Responses to the closed-ended questions were summarised through the use of descriptive statistics. The responses to the open questions were analysed and coded into recurring themes that were derived from the data. Logistic regression analyses were performed to explore the relationship between the demographic variables and the responses to the closed-ended questions.
Outcomes & results:
Participants were overwhelmingly positive about aphasia therapy apps and saw the potential for their clients to use apps independently. As facilitators of app use, participants reported accessibility and inclusion of different language modalities, while high costs, absence of a compatible device, and clients' potential computer illiteracy were listed as barriers. None of the analysed demographic factors consistently influenced differences in participants' attitudes towards aphasia therapy apps.
Conclusions:
The positive, extensive and insightful feedback from speech and language therapists is both useful and encouraging for app developers and aphasia researchers, and should facilitate the development of appropriate, high-quality therapy apps.
Judging the animacy of words
(2017)
The age at which members of a semantic category are learned (age of acquisition), the typicality they demonstrate within their corresponding category, and the semantic domain to which they belong (living, non-living) are known to influence the speed and accuracy of lexical/semantic processing. So far, only a few studies have looked at the origin of age of acquisition and its interdependence with typicality and semantic domain within the same experimental design. Twenty adult participants performed an animacy decision task in which nouns were classified according to their semantic domain as being living or non-living. Response times were influenced by the independent main effects of each parameter: typicality, age of acquisition, semantic domain, and frequency. However, there were no interactions. The results are discussed with respect to recent models concerning the origin of age of acquisition effects.
Alcohol intoxication is known to affect many aspects of human behavior and cognition; one of such affected systems is articulation during speech production. Although much research has revealed that alcohol negatively impacts pronunciation in a first language (L1), there is only initial evidence suggesting a potential beneficial effect of inebriation on articulation in a non-native language (L2). The aim of this study was thus to compare the effect of alcohol consumption on pronunciation in an L1 and an L2. Participants who had ingested different amounts of alcohol provided speech samples in their L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English), and native speakers of each language subsequently rated the pronunciation of these samples on their intelligibility (for the L1) and accent nativelikeness (for the L2). These data were analyzed with generalized additive mixed modeling. Participants' blood alcohol concentration indeed negatively affected pronunciation in L1, but it produced no significant effect on the L2 accent ratings. The expected negative impact of alcohol on L1 articulation can be explained by reduction in fine motor control. We present two hypotheses to account for the absence of any effects of intoxication on L2 pronunciation: (1) there may be a reduction in L1 interference on L2 speech due to decreased motor control or (2) alcohol may produce a differential effect on each of the two linguistic subsystems.
Alcohol intoxication is known to affect many aspects of human behavior and cognition; one of such affected systems is articulation during speech production. Although much research has revealed that alcohol negatively impacts pronunciation in a first language (L1), there is only initial evidence suggesting a potential beneficial effect of inebriation on articulation in a non-native language (L2). The aim of this study was thus to compare the effect of alcohol consumption on pronunciation in an L1 and an L2. Participants who had ingested different amounts of alcohol provided speech samples in their L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English), and native speakers of each language subsequently rated the pronunciation of these samples on their intelligibility (for the L1) and accent nativelikeness (for the L2). These data were analyzed with generalized additive mixed modeling. Participants' blood alcohol concentration indeed negatively affected pronunciation in L1, but it produced no significant effect on the L2 accent ratings. The expected negative impact of alcohol on L1 articulation can be explained by reduction in fine motor control. We present two hypotheses to account for the absence of any effects of intoxication on L2 pronunciation: (1) there may be a reduction in L1 interference on L2 speech due to decreased motor control or (2) alcohol may produce a differential effect on each of the two linguistic subsystems.
Background
Simple water-swallowing screening tools are not predictive of aspiration and dysphagia in patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD). We investigated the diagnostic accuracy of a multi-texture screening tool, the Gugging Swallowing Screen (GUSS) to identify aspiration and dysphagia/penetration in PD patients compared to flexible endoscopic evaluation of swallowing (FEES).
Methods
Swallowing function was evaluated in 51 PD participants in clinical 'on-medication' state with the GUSS and a FEES examination according to standardized protocols. Inter-rater reliability and convergent validity were determined and GUSS- and FEES-based diet recommendations were compared.
Key Results
Inter-rater reliability of GUSS ratings was high (r(s) = 0.8; p < 0.001). Aspiration was identified by the GUSS with a sensitivity of 50%, and specificity of 51.35% (PPV 28%, NPV 73%, LR+ 1.03, LR- 0.97), dysphagia/penetration was identified with 72.97% sensitivity and 35.71% specificity (PPV 75%, NPV 33.33%, LR+ 1.14, LR- 0.76). Agreement between GUSS- and FEES-based diet recommendations was low (r(s) = 0.12, p = 0.42) with consistent NPO (Nil per Os) allocation by GUSS and FEES in only one participant.
Conclusions and Inferences
The multi-texture screening tool GUSS in its current form, although applicable with good inter-rater reliability, does not detect aspiration in PD patients with acceptable accuracy. Modifications of the GUSS parameters "coughing," "voice change" and "delayed swallowing" might enhance validity. The GUSS' diet recommendations overestimate the need for oral intake restriction in PD patients and should be verified by instrumental swallowing examination.
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.
This eye-tracking study establishes basic benchmarks of eye movements during reading in heritage language (HL) by Russian-speaking adults and adolescents of high (n = 21) and low proficiency (n = 27). Heritage speakers (HSs) read sentences in Cyrillic, and their eye movements were compared to those of Russian monolingual skilled adult readers, 8-year-old children and L2 learners. Reading patterns of HSs revealed longer mean fixation durations, lower skipping probabilities, and higher regressive saccade rates than in monolingual adults. High-proficient HSs were more similar to monolingual children, while low-proficient HSs performed on par with L2 learners. Low-proficient HSs differed from high-proficient HSs in exhibiting lower skipping probabilities, higher fixation counts, and larger frequency effects. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the weaker links account of bilingual language processing as well as the divergent attainment theory of HL.
Only the right noise?
(2020)
Seminal work by Werker and colleagues (Stager & Werker [1997]Nature, 388, 381-382) has found that 14-month-old infants do not show evidence for learning minimal pairs in the habituation-switch paradigm. However, when multiple speakers produce the minimal pair in acoustically variable ways, infants' performance improves in comparison to a single speaker condition (Rost & McMurray [2009]Developmental Science, 12, 339-349). The current study further extends these results and assesses how different kinds of input variability affect 14-month-olds' minimal pair learning in the habituation-switch paradigm testing German learning infants. The first two experiments investigated word learning when the labels were spoken by a single speaker versus when the labels were spoken by multiple speakers. In the third experiment we studied whether non-acoustic variability, implemented by visual variability of the objects presented together with the labels, would also affect minimal pair learning. We found enhanced learning in the multiple speakers compared to the single speaker condition, confirming previous findings with English-learning infants. In contrast, visual variability of the presented objects did not support learning. These findings both confirm and better delimit the beneficial role of speech-specific variability in minimal pair learning. Finally, we review different proposals on the mechanisms via which variability confers benefits to learning and outline what may be likely principles that underlie this benefit. We highlight among these the multiplicity of acoustic cues signalling phonemic contrasts and the presence of relations among these cues. It is in these relations where we trace part of the source for the apparent paradoxical benefit of variability in learning.
Only the right noise?
(2020)
Seminal work by Werker and colleagues (Stager & Werker [1997]Nature, 388, 381-382) has found that 14-month-old infants do not show evidence for learning minimal pairs in the habituation-switch paradigm. However, when multiple speakers produce the minimal pair in acoustically variable ways, infants' performance improves in comparison to a single speaker condition (Rost & McMurray [2009]Developmental Science, 12, 339-349). The current study further extends these results and assesses how different kinds of input variability affect 14-month-olds' minimal pair learning in the habituation-switch paradigm testing German learning infants. The first two experiments investigated word learning when the labels were spoken by a single speaker versus when the labels were spoken by multiple speakers. In the third experiment we studied whether non-acoustic variability, implemented by visual variability of the objects presented together with the labels, would also affect minimal pair learning. We found enhanced learning in the multiple speakers compared to the single speaker condition, confirming previous findings with English-learning infants. In contrast, visual variability of the presented objects did not support learning. These findings both confirm and better delimit the beneficial role of speech-specific variability in minimal pair learning. Finally, we review different proposals on the mechanisms via which variability confers benefits to learning and outline what may be likely principles that underlie this benefit. We highlight among these the multiplicity of acoustic cues signalling phonemic contrasts and the presence of relations among these cues. It is in these relations where we trace part of the source for the apparent paradoxical benefit of variability in learning.
Word forms such as walked or walker are decomposed into their morphological constituents (walk + -ed/-er) during language comprehension. Yet, the efficiency of morphological decomposition seems to vary for different languages and morphological types, as well as for first and second language speakers. The current study reports results from a visual masked priming experiment focusing on different types of derived word forms (specifically prefixed vs. suffixed) in first and second language speakers of German. We compared the present findings with results from previous studies on inflection and compounding and proposed an account of morphological decomposition that captures both the variability and the consistency of morphological decomposition for different morphological types and for first and second language speakers. Open Practices This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. Study materials are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at . Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science.
This study addresses the question of whether and how growing up with more than one language shapes a child's language impairment. Our focus is on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual (Turkish-German) children. We specifically investigated a range of phenomena related to the so-called CP (Complementizer Phrase) in German, the hierarchically highest layer of syntactic clause structure, which has been argued to be particularly affected in children with SLI. Spontaneous speech data were examined from bilingual children with SLI in comparison to two comparison groups: (i) typically-developing bilingual children, (ii) monolingual children with SLI. We found that despite persistent difficulty with subject-verb agreement, the two groups of children with SLI did not show any impairment of the CP-domain. We conclude that while subject-verb agreement is a suitable linguistic marker of SLI in German-speaking children, for both monolingual and bilingual ones, 'vulnerability of the CP-domain' is not.
This study addresses the question of whether and how growing up with more than one language shapes a child's language impairment. Our focus is on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual (Turkish-German) children. We specifically investigated a range of phenomena related to the so-called CP (Complementizer Phrase) in German, the hierarchically highest layer of syntactic clause structure, which has been argued to be particularly affected in children with SLI. Spontaneous speech data were examined from bilingual children with SLI in comparison to two comparison groups: (i) typically-developing bilingual children, (ii) monolingual children with SLI. We found that despite persistent difficulty with subject-verb agreement, the two groups of children with SLI did not show any impairment of the CP-domain. We conclude that while subject-verb agreement is a suitable linguistic marker of SLI in German-speaking children, for both monolingual and bilingual ones, 'vulnerability of the CP-domain' is not.
This dissertation examines the integration of incongruent visual-scene and morphological-case information (“cues”) in building thematic-role representations of spoken relative clauses in German.
Addressing the mutual influence of visual and linguistic processing, the Coordinated Interplay Account (CIA) describes a mechanism in two steps supporting visuo-linguistic integration (Knoeferle & Crocker, 2006, Cog Sci). However, the outcomes and dynamics of integrating incongruent thematic-role representations from distinct sources have been investigated scarcely. Further, there is evidence that both second-language (L2) and older speakers may rely on non-syntactic cues relatively more than first-language (L1)/young speakers. Yet, the role of visual information for thematic-role comprehension has not been measured in L2 speakers, and only limitedly across the adult lifespan.
Thematically unambiguous canonically ordered (subject-extracted) and noncanonically ordered (object-extracted) spoken relative clauses in German (see 1a-b) were presented in isolation and alongside visual scenes conveying either the same (congruent) or the opposite (incongruent) thematic relations as the sentence did.
1 a Das ist der Koch, der die Braut verfolgt.
This is the.NOM cook who.NOM the.ACC bride follows
This is the cook who is following the bride.
b Das ist der Koch, den die Braut verfolgt.
This is the.NOM cook whom.ACC the.NOM bride follows
This is the cook whom the bride is following.
The relative contribution of each cue to thematic-role representations was assessed with agent identification. Accuracy and latency data were collected post-sentence from a sample of L1 and L2 speakers (Zona & Felser, 2023), and from a sample of L1 speakers from across the adult lifespan (Zona & Reifegerste, under review). In addition, the moment-by-moment dynamics of thematic-role assignment were investigated with mouse tracking in a young L1 sample (Zona, under review).
The following questions were addressed: (1) How do visual scenes influence thematic-role representations of canonical and noncanonical sentences? (2) How does reliance on visual-scene, case, and word-order cues vary in L1 and L2 speakers? (3) How does reliance on visual-scene, case, and word-order cues change across the lifespan?
The results showed reliable effects of incongruence of visually and linguistically conveyed thematic relations on thematic-role representations. Incongruent (vs. congruent) scenes yielded slower and less accurate responses to agent-identification probes presented post-sentence. The recently inspected agent was considered as the most likely agent ~300ms after trial onset, and the convergence of visual scenes and word order enabled comprehenders to assign thematic roles predictively.
L2 (vs. L1) participants relied more on word order overall. In response to noncanonical clauses presented with incongruent visual scenes, sensitivity to case predicted the size of incongruence effects better than L1-L2 grouping. These results suggest that the individual’s ability to exploit specific cues might predict their weighting.
Sensitivity to case was stable throughout the lifespan, while visual effects increased with increasing age and were modulated by individual interference-inhibition levels. Thus, age-related changes in comprehension may stem from stronger reliance on visually (vs. linguistically) conveyed meaning.
These patterns represent evidence for a recent-role preference – i.e., a tendency to re-assign visually conveyed thematic roles to the same referents in temporally coordinated utterances. The findings (i) extend the generalizability of CIA predictions across stimuli, tasks, populations, and measures of interest, (ii) contribute to specifying the outcomes and mechanisms of detecting and indexing incongruent representations within the CIA, and (iii) speak to current efforts to understand the sources of variability in sentence comprehension.
The study of perceptual flexibility in speech depends on a variety of tasks that feature a large degree of variability between participants. Of critical interest is whether measures are consistent within an individual or across stimulus contexts. This is particularly key for individual difference designs that are deployed to examine the neural basis or clinical consequences of perceptual flexibility. In the present set of experiments, we assess the split-half reliability and construct validity of five measures of perceptual flexibility: three of learning in a native language context (e.g., understanding someone with a foreign accent) and two of learning in a non-native context (e.g., learning to categorize non-native speech sounds). We find that most of these tasks show an appreciable level of split-half reliability, although construct validity was sometimes weak. This provides good evidence for reliability for these tasks, while highlighting possible upper limits on expected effect sizes involving each measure.
Agreement attraction is a cross-linguistic phenomenon where a verb occasionally agrees not with its subject, as required by grammar, but instead with an unrelated noun ("The key to the cabinets were horizontal ellipsis ").
Despite the clear violation of grammatical rules, comprehenders often rate these sentences as acceptable. Contenders for explaining agreement attraction fall into two broad classes: Morphosyntactic accounts specifically designed to explain agreement attraction, and more general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model, which explain attraction as a consequence of how linguistic structure is stored and accessed in content-addressable memory.
In the present research, we disambiguate between these two classes by testing a surprising prediction made by the Lewis and Vasishth model but not by the morphosyntactic accounts, namely, that attraction should not be limited to morphosyntax, but that semantic features of unrelated nouns equally induce attraction.
A recent study by Cunnings and Sturt provided initial evidence that this may be the case. Here, we report three single-trial experiments in English that compared semantic and agreement attraction and tested whether and how the two interact.
All three experiments showed strong semantically induced attraction effects closely mirroring agreement attraction effects. We complement these results with computational simulations which confirmed that the Lewis and Vasishth model can faithfully reproduce the observed results.
In sum, our findings suggest that attraction is a more general phenomenon than is commonly believed, and therefore favor more general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model.
The present dissertation investigates changes in lingual coarticulation across childhood in German-speaking children from three to nine years of age and adults. Coarticulation refers to the mismatch between the abstract phonological units and their seemingly commingled realization in continuous speech. Being a process at the intersection of phonology and phonetics, addressing its changes across childhood allows for insights in speech motor as well as phonological developments. Because specific predictions for changes in coarticulation across childhood can be derived from existing speech production models, investigating children’s coarticulatory patterns can help us model human speech production.
While coarticulatory changes may shed light on some of the central questions of speech production development, previous studies on the topic were sparse and presented a puzzling picture of conflicting findings. One of the reasons for this lack is the difficulty in articulatory data acquisition in a young population. Within the research program this dissertation is embedded in, we accepted this challenge and successfully set up the hitherto largest corpus of articulatory data from children using ultrasound tongue imaging. In contrast to earlier studies, a high number of participants in tight age cohorts across a wide age range and a thoroughly controlled set of pseudowords allowed for statistically powerful investigations of a process known as variable and complicated to track.
The specific focus of my studies is on lingual vocalic coarticulation as measured in the horizontal position of the highest point of the tongue dorsum. Based on three studies on a) anticipatory coarticulation towards the left, b) carryover coarticulation towards the right side of the utterance, and c) anticipatory coarticulatory extent in repeated versus read aloud speech, I deduct the following main theses:
1. Maturing speech motor control is responsible for some developmental changes in coarticulation.
2. Coarticulation can be modeled as the coproduction of articulatory gestures.
3. The developmental change in coarticulation results from a decrease of vocalic activation width.
Èto-clefts are Russian focus constructions with the demonstrative pronoun èto ‘this’ at the beginning: “Èto Mark vyigral gonku” (“It was Mark who won the race”). They are often being compared with English it-clefts, German es-clefts, as well as the corresponding focus-background structures in other languages.
In terms of semantics, èto-clefts have two important properties which are cross-linguistically typical for clefts: existence presupposition (“Someone won the race”) and exhaustivity (“Nobody except Mark won the race”). However, the exhaustivity effects are not as strong as exhaustivity effects in structures with the exclusive only and require more research.
At the same time, the question if the syntactic structure of èto-clefts matches the biclausal structure of English and German clefts, remains open. There are arguments in favor of biclausality, as well as monoclausality. Besides, there is no consistency regarding the status of èto itself.
Finally, the information structure of èto-clefts has remained underexplored in the existing literature.
This research investigates the information-structural, syntactic, and semantic properties of Russian clefts, both theoretically (supported by examples from Russian text corpora and judgments from native speakers) and experimentally. It is determined which desired changes in the information structure motivate native speakers to choose an èto-cleft and not the canonical structure or other focus realization tools. Novel syntactic tests are conducted to find evidence for bi-/monoclausality of èto-clefts, as well as for base-generation or movement of the cleft pivot. It is hypothesized that èto has a certain important function in clefts, and its status is investigated. Finally, new experiments on the nature of exhaustivity in èto-clefts are conducted. They allow for direct cross-linguistic comparison, using an incremental-information paradigm with truth-value judgments.
In terms of information structure, this research makes a new proposal that presents èto-clefts as structures with an inherent focus-background bipartitioning. Even though èto-clefts are used in typical focus contexts, evidence was found that èto-clefts (as well as Russian thetic clefts) allow for both new information focus and contrastive focus. Èto-clefts are pragmatically acceptable when a singleton answer to the implied question is expected (e.g. “It was Mark who won the race” but not “It was Mark who came to the party”). Importantly, èto in Russian clefts is neither dummy, nor redundant, but is a topic expression; conveys familiarity which triggers existence presupposition; refers to an instantiated event, or a known/perceivable situation; finally, èto plays an important role in the spoken language as a tool for speech coherency and a focus marker.
In terms of syntax, this research makes a new monoclausal proposal and shows evidence that the cleft pivot undergoes movement to the left peripheral position. Èto is proposed to be TopP.
Finally, in terms of semantics, a novel cross-linguistic evaluation of Russian clefts is made. Experiments show that the exhaustivity inference in èto-clefts is not robust. Participants used different strategies in resolving exhaustivity, falling into 2 groups: one group considered èto-clefts exhaustive, while another group considered them non-exhaustive. Hence, there is evidence for the pragmatic nature of exhaustivity in èto-clefts. The experimental results for èto-clefts are similar to the experimental results for clefts in German, French and Akan. It is concluded that speakers use different tools available in their languages to produce structures with similar interpretive properties.
It is a common finding that preschoolers have difficulties in identifying who is doing what to whom in non-canonical sentences, such as (object-verb-subject) OVS and passive sentences in German. This dissertation investigates how German monolingual and German-Italian simultaneous bilingual children process German OVS sentences in Study 1 and German passives in Study 2. Offline data (i.e., accuracy data) and online data (i.e., eye-gaze and pupillometry data) were analyzed to explore whether children can assign thematic roles during sentence comprehension and processing. Executive functions, language-internal and -external factors were investigated as potential predictors for children’s sentence comprehension and processing.
Throughout the literature, there are contradicting findings on the relation between language and executive functions. While some results show a bilingual cognitive advantage over monolingual speakers, others suggest there is no relationship between bilingualism and executive functions. If bilingual children possess more advanced executive function abilities than monolingual children, then this might also be reflected in a better performance on linguistic tasks. In the current studies monolingual and bilingual children were tested by means of two executive function tasks: the Flanker task and the task-switching paradigm. However, these findings showed no bilingual cognitive advantages and no better performance by bilingual children in the linguistic tasks. The performance was rather comparable between bilingual and monolingual children, or even better for the monolingual group. This may be due to cross-linguistic influences and language experience (i.e., language input and output). Italian was used because it does not syntactically overlap with the structure of German OVS sentences, and it only overlapped with one of the two types of sentence condition used for the passive study - considering the subject-(finite)verb alignment. The findings showed a better performance of bilingual children in the passive sentence structure that syntactically overlapped in the two languages, providing evidence for cross-linguistic influences.
Further factors for children’s sentence comprehension were considered. The parents’ education, the number of older siblings and language experience variables were derived from a language background questionnaire completed by parents. Scores of receptive vocabulary and grammar, visual and short-term memory and reasoning ability were measured by means of standardized tests. It was shown that higher German language experience by bilinguals correlates with better accuracy in German OVS sentences but not in passive sentences. Memory capacity had a positive effect on the comprehension of OVS and passive sentences in the bilingual group. Additionally, a role was played by executive function abilities in the comprehension of OVS sentences and not of passive sentences. It is suggested that executive function abilities might help children in the sentence comprehension task when the linguistic structures are not yet fully mastered.
Altogether, these findings show that bilinguals’ poorer performance in the comprehension and processing of German OVS is mainly due to reduced language experience in German, and that the different performance of bilingual children with the two types of passives is mainly due to cross-linguistic influences.
A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world's 7000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in many of them. Here, we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal of Child Language, First Language, Language Acquisition and Language Learning and Development. We coded each article for several variables, including (1) participant group (mono vs multilingual), (2) language(s), (3) topic(s) and (4) country of author affiliation, from each journal's inception until the end of 2020. We found that we have at least one article published on around 103 languages, representing approximately 1.5% of the world's languages. The distribution of articles was highly skewed towards English and other well-studied Indo-European languages, with the majority of non-Indo-European languages having just one paper. A majority of the papers focused on studies of monolingual children, although papers did not always explicitly report participant group status. The distribution of topics across language categories was more even. The number of articles published on non-Indo-European languages from countries outside of North America and Europe is increasing; however, this increase is driven by research conducted in relatively wealthy countries. Overall, the vast majority of the research was produced in the Global North. We conclude that, despite a proud history of crosslinguistic research, the goals of the discipline need to be recalibrated before we can lay claim to truly a representative account of child language acquisition.
Languages differ in whether or not they allow discontinuous noun phrases. If they do, they further vary in the ways the nominal projections interact with the available syntactic operations. Yucatec Maya has two left-peripheral configurations that differ syntactically: a preverbal position for foci or wh-elements that is filled in by movement, and the possibility to adjoin topics at the highest clausal layer. These two structural options are reflected in different ways of the formation of discontinuous patterns. Subextraction from nominal projections to the focus position yielding discontinuous NPs is possible, but subject to several restrictions. It observes conditions on extraction domains, and does not apply to the left branch of nominal structures. The topic position also appears to license discontinuity, typically involving a non-referential nominal expression as the topic and quantifiers/adjectives that form an elliptical nominal projection within the clause proper. Such constructions can involve several morphological and syntactic mismatches between their parts that are excluded for continuous noun phrases, and they are not sensitive to syntactic island restrictions. Thus, in a strict sense, discontinuities involving the topic position are only apparent, because the construction involves two independent nominal projections that are semantically linked.
In syntactic dependency trees, when arcs are drawn from syntactic heads to dependents, they rarely cross. Constraints on these crossing dependencies are critical for determining the syntactic properties of human language, because they define the position of natural language in formal language hierarchies. We study whether the apparent constraints on crossing syntactic dependencies in natural language might be explained by constraints on dependency lengths (the linear distance between heads and dependents). We compare real dependency trees from treebanks of 52 languages against baselines of random trees which are matched with the real trees in terms of their dependency lengths. We find that these baseline trees have many more crossing dependencies than real trees, indicating that a constraint on dependency lengths alone cannot explain the empirical rarity of crossing dependencies. However, we find evidence that a combined constraint on dependency length and the rate of crossing dependencies might be able to explain two of the most-studied formal restrictions on dependency trees: gap degree and well-nestedness.
In this study, we investigated the cognitive-emotional interplay by measuring the effects of executive competition (Pessoa, 2013), i.e., how inhibitory control is influenced when emotional information is encountered. Sixty-three children (8 to 9 years of age) participated in an inhibition task (central task) accompanied by happy, sad, or neutral emoticons (displayed in the periphery). Typical interference effects were found in the main task for speed and accuracy, but in general, these effects were not additionally modulated by the peripheral emoticons indicating that processing of the main task exhausted the limited capacity such that interference from the task-irrelevant, peripheral information did not show (Pessoa, 2013). Further analyses revealed that the magnitude of interference effects depended on the order of congruency conditions: when incongruent conditions preceded congruent ones, there was greater interference. This effect was smaller in sad conditions, and particularly so at the beginning of the experiment. These findings suggest that the bottom-up perception of task-irrelevant emotional information influenced the top-down process of inhibitory control among children in the sad condition when processing demands were particularly high. We discuss if the salience and valence of the emotional stimuli as well as task demands are the decisive characteristics that modulate the strength of this relation.
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.
Sonority is a fundamental notion in phonetics and phonology, central to many descriptions of the syllable and various useful predictions in phonotactics. Although widely accepted, sonority lacks a clear basis in speech articulation or perception, given that traditional formal principles in linguistic theory are often exclusively based on discrete units in symbolic representation and are typically not designed to be compatible with auditory perception, sensorimotor control, or general cognitive capacities. In addition, traditional sonority principles also exhibit systematic gaps in empirical coverage. Against this backdrop, we propose the incorporation of symbol-based and signal-based models to adequately account for sonority in a complementary manner. We claim that sonority is primarily a perceptual phenomenon related to pitch, driving the optimization of syllables as pitch-bearing units in all language systems. We suggest a measurable acoustic correlate for sonority in terms of periodic energy, and we provide a novel principle that can account for syllabic well-formedness, the nucleus attraction principle (NAP). We present perception experiments that test our two NAP-based models against four traditional sonority models, and we use a Bayesian data analysis approach to test and compare them. Our symbolic NAP model outperforms all the other models we test, while our continuous bottom-up NAP model is at second place, along with the best performing traditional models. We interpret the results as providing strong support for our proposals: (i) the designation of periodic energy as the acoustic correlate of sonority; (ii) the incorporation of continuous entities in phonological models of perception; and (iii) the dual-model strategy that separately analyzes symbol-based top-down processes and signal-based bottom-up processes in speech perception.
We investigated the processing of morphologically complex words adopting an approach that goes beyond estimating average effects and allows testing predictions about variability in performance. We tested masked morphological priming effects with English derived ('printer') and inflected ('printed') forms priming their stems ('print') in non-native speakers, a population that is characterized by large variability. We modeled reaction times with a shifted-lognormal distribution using Bayesian distributional models, which allow assessing effects of experimental manipulations on both the mean of the response distribution ('mu') and its standard deviation ('sigma'). Our results show similar effects on mean response times for inflected and derived primes, but a difference between the two on the sigma of the distribution, with inflectional priming increasing response time variability to a significantly larger extent than derivational priming. This is in line with previous research on non-native processing, which shows more variable results across studies for the processing of inflected forms than for derived forms. More generally, our study shows that treating variability in performance as a direct object of investigation can crucially inform models of language processing, by disentangling effects which would otherwise be indistinguishable. We therefore emphasize the importance of looking beyond average performance and testing predictions on other parameters of the distribution rather than just its central tendency.
Pivots revisited
(2021)
The term "pivot" usually refers to two overlapping syntactic units such that the completion of the first unit simultaneously launches the second. In addition, pivots are generally said to be characterized by the smooth prosodic integration of their syntactic parts. This prosodic integration is typically achieved by prosodic-phonetic matching of the pivot components. As research on such turns in a range of languages has illustrated, speakers routinely deploy pivots so as to be able to continue past a point of possible turn completion, in the service of implementing some additional or revised action. This article seeks to build on, and complement, earlier research by exploring two issues in more detail as follows: (1) what exactly do pivotal turn extensions accomplish on the action dimension, and (2) what role does prosodic-phonetic packaging play in this? We will show that pivot constructions not only exhibit various degrees of prosodic-phonetic (non-)integration, i.e., differently strong cesuras, but that they can be ordered on a continuum, and that this cline maps onto the relationship of the actions accomplished by the components of the pivot construction. While tighter prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., weak(er) cesuring, co-occurs with post-pivot actions whose relationship to that of the pre-pivot tends to be rather retrospective in character, looser prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., strong(er) cesuring, is associated with a more prospective orientation of the post-pivot's action. These observations also raise more general questions with regard to the analysis of action.
Language processing requires memory retrieval to integrate current input with previous context and making predictions about upcoming input. We propose that prediction and retrieval are two sides of the same coin, i.e. functionally the same, as they both activate memory representations. Under this assumption, memory retrieval and prediction should interact: Retrieval interference can only occur at a word that triggers retrieval and a fully predicted word would not do that. The present study investigated the proposed interaction with event-related potentials (ERPs) during the processing of sentence pairs in German. Predictability was measured via cloze probability. Memory retrieval was manipulated via the position of a distractor inducing proactive or retroactive similarity-based interference. Linear mixed model analyses provided evidence for the hypothesised interaction in a broadly distributed negativity, which we discuss in relation to the interference ERP literature. Our finding supports the proposal that memory retrieval and prediction are functionally the same.
In two experiments, we compared the dynamics of corticospinal excitability when processing visually or linguistically presented tool-oriented hand actions in native speakers and sequential bilinguals. In a third experiment we used the same procedure to test non-motor, low-level stimuli, i.e. scrambled images and pseudo-words.
Stimuli were presented in sequence: pictures (tool + tool-oriented hand action or their scrambled counterpart) and words (tool noun + tool-action verb or pseudo-words). Experiment 1 presented German linguistic stimuli to native speakers, while Experiment 2 presented English stimuli to non-natives. Experiment 3 tested Italian native speakers. Single-pulse trascranial magnetic stimulation (spTMS) was applied to the left motor cortex at five different timings: baseline, 200 ms after tool/noun onset, 150, 350 and 500 ms after hand/verb onset with motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and abductor digiti minimi (ADM) muscles.
We report strong similarities in the dynamics of corticospinal excitability across the visual and linguistic modalities. MEPs' suppression started as early as 150 ms and lasted for the duration of stimulus presentation (500 ms). Moreover, we show that this modulation is absent for stimuli with no motor content. Overall, our study supports the notion of a core, overarching system of action semantics shared by different modalities.
This paper addresses the relation between syllable structure and inter-segmental temporal coordination. The data examined are Electromagnetic Articulometry recordings from six speakers of Central Peninsular Spanish (henceforth, Spanish), producing words beginning with the clusters /pl, bl, kl, gl, p(sic), k(sic), t(sic)/ as well as corresponding unclustered sonorant-initial words in three vowel contexts /a, e, o/. In our results, we find evidence for a global organization of the segments involved in these combinations. This is reflected in a number of ways: shortening of the prevocalic sonorant in the cluster-initial case compared to the unclustered case, reorganization of the relative timing of the internal CV subsequence (in a CCV) in the obstruent-lateral context, early vowel initiation, and a strong compensatory relation between the duration of the obstruent-to-lateral transition and the duration of the lateral. In other words, we find that the global organization presiding over the segments partaking in these tautosyllabic CCVs is pleiotropic, that is, simultaneously expressed over a set of different phonetic parameters rather than via a privileged metric such as c-center stability or any other such given single measure (employed in prior works).
Several studies (e.g., Wicha et al., 2003b; DeLong et al., 2005) have shown that readers use information from the sentential context to predict nouns (or some of their features), and that predictability effects can be inferred from the EEG signal in determiners or adjectives appearing before the predicted noun. While these findings provide evidence for the pre-activation proposal, recent replication attempts together with inconsistencies in the results from the literature cast doubt on the robustness of this phenomenon. Our study presents the first attempt to use the effect of gender on predictability in German to study the pre-activation hypothesis, capitalizing on the fact that all German nouns have a gender and that their preceding determiners can show an unambiguous gender marking when the noun phrase has accusative case. Despite having a relatively large sample size (of 120 subjects), both our preregistered and exploratory analyses failed to yield conclusive evidence for or against an effect of pre-activation. The sign of the effect is, however, in the expected direction: the more unexpected the gender of the determiner, the larger the negativity. The recent, inconclusive replication attempts by Nieuwland et al. (2018) and others also show effects with signs in the expected direction. We conducted a Bayesian random-ef-fects meta-analysis using our data and the publicly available data from these recent replication attempts. Our meta-analysis shows a relatively clear but very small effect that is consistent with the pre-activation account and demonstrates a very important advantage of the Bayesian data analysis methodology: we can incrementally accumulate evidence to obtain increasingly precise estimates of the effect of interest.
While much attention has been devoted to the cognition of aging multilingual individuals, little is known about how age affects their grammatical processing. We assessed subject-verb number-agreement processing in sixty native (L1) and sixty non-native (L2) speakers of German (age: 18-84) using a binary-choice sentence-completion task, along with various individual-differences tests. Our results revealed differential effects of age on L1 and L2 speakers' accuracy and reaction times (RTs). L1 speakers' RTs increased with age, and they became more susceptible to attraction errors. In contrast, L2 speakers' RTs decreased, once age-related slowing was controlled for, and their overall accuracy increased. We interpret this as resulting from increased L2 exposure. Moreover, L2 speakers' accuracy/RT patterns were more strongly affected by cognitive variables (working memory, interference control) than L1 speakers'. Our findings show that as regards bilinguals' grammatical processing ability, aging is associated with both gains (in experience) and losses (in cognitive abilities).
Language skills and mathematical competencies are argued to influence each other during development. While a relation between the development of vocabulary size and mathematical skills is already documented in the literature, this study further examines how children's ability to map a novel word to an unknown object as well as their ability to retain this word from memory may be related to their knowledge of number words. Twenty-five children were tested longitudinally (at 30 and at 36 months of age) using an eye-tracking-based fast mapping task, the Give-a Number task, and standardized measures of vocabulary. The results reveal that children's ability to create and retain a mental representation of a novel word was related to number knowledge at 30 months, but not at 36 months while vocabulary size correlated with number knowledge only at 36 months. These results show that even specific mapping processes are initially related to the acquisition of number words and they speak for a parallelism between the development of lexical and number-concept knowledge despite their semantic and syntactic differences.
Aspirationspneumonien sind eine häufige Todesursache bei Dysphagiepatient*innen. In diesem Beitrag wird durch die Evaluation relevanter Studien die Frage untersucht, ob die therapeutische Mundpflege bei Dysphagiepatient*innen zur Verringerung des Pneumonierisikos beitragen kann. Zudem wird auf dieser Grundlage eine Handlungsempfehlung für die Umsetzung der Mundpflege entwickelt.
Die ausgewählten Studien zeigen, dass die Mundpflege einen positiven Effekt auf das Pneumonie-Risiko von Dysphagiepatient*innen hat. Sie sollte auf den Grundsätzen Einfachheit, Sicherheit, Arbeitskräfteentlastung, Wirksamkeit, Universalität, Wirtschaftlichkeit und vollständige Mundpflege aller Teile der Mundhöhle beruhen und nimmt weniger als fünf Minuten täglich ein. Sie bereitet durch die taktile Stimulation auf die anschließende Dysphagie-Therapie vor und ist somit sinnvoll investierte Therapiezeit.
Individuals differ in the time needed to name a picture. This contribution asks whether this inter-individual variability emerges in earlier stages of word production (e.g. lexical selection) or later stages (e.g. articulation) and examines the consequences of this variability for EEG group results. We measured participants' (N = 45) naming latencies and continuous EEG in a picture-word interference task and naming latencies in a delayed naming task. Inter-individual variability in naming latencies in immediate naming (in contrast with inter-item variability) was not larger than the variability in the delayed task, suggesting that some variability in immediate naming originates in later stages of word production. EEG data complemented this interpretation: Differences between relatively fast vs. slow speakers emerged in response-aligned analyses in a time window close to the vocal response. We additionally present a method to assess the generalisability of the timing of effects across participants based on random sampling.
I can see it in your eyes
(2021)
Over the past years, extensive research has been dedicated to developing robust platforms and data-driven dialog models to support long-term human-robot interactions. However, little is known about how people's perception of robots and engagement with them develop over time and how these can be accurately assessed through implicit and continuous measurement techniques. In this paper, we explore this by involving participants in three interaction sessions with multiple days of zero exposure in between. Each session consists of a joint task with a robot as well as two short social chats with it before and after the task. We measure participants' gaze patterns with a wearable eye-tracker and gauge their perception of the robot and engagement with it and the joint task using questionnaires. Results disclose that aversion of gaze in a social chat is an indicator of a robot's uncanniness and that the more people gaze at the robot in a joint task, the worse they perform. In contrast with most HRI literature, our results show that gaze toward an object of shared attention, rather than gaze toward a robotic partner, is the most meaningful predictor of engagement in a joint task. Furthermore, the analyses of gaze patterns in repeated interactions disclose that people's mutual gaze in a social chat develops congruently with their perceptions of the robot over time. These are key findings for the HRI community as they entail that gaze behavior can be used as an implicit measure of people's perception of robots in a social chat and of their engagement and task performance in a joint task.
In recent experimental work, arguments for or against Condition C reconstruction in A'-movement have been based on low/high availability of coreference in sentences with and without A'-movement. We argue that this reasoning is problematic: It involves arbitrary thresholds, and the results are potentially confounded by the different surface orders of the compared structures and non-syntactic factors. We present three experiments with designs that do not require defining thresholds of 'low' or 'high' coreference values. Instead, we focus on grammatical contrasts (wh-movement vs. relativization, subject vs. object wh-movement) and aim to identify and reduce confounds. The results show that reconstruction for A'-movement of DPs is not very robust in German, contra previous findings. Our results are compatible with the view that the surface order and non-syntactic factors (e.g. plausibility, referential accessibility of an R-expression) heavily influence coreference possibilities. Thus, the data argue against a theory that includes both reconstruction and a hard Condition C constraint. There is a residual contrast between sentences with subject/object movement, which is compatible with an account without reconstruction (and an additional non-syntactic factor) or an account with reconstruction (and a soft Condition C constraint).
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.
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.
Spatiotemporal coordination in word-medial stop-lateral and s-stop clusters of American English
(2021)
This paper is concerned with the relation between syllabic organization and intersegmental spatiotemporal coordination using Electromagnetic Articulometry recordings from seven speakers of American English (henceforth, English). Whereas previous work on English has focused on word-initial clusters (preceding a vowel whose identity was not systematically varied), the present work examined word-medial clusters /pl, kl, sp, sk/ in the context of three different vowel heights (high, mid, low). Our results provide evidence for a global organization for the segments involved in these cluster-vowel combinations. This is reflected in a number of ways: compression of the prevocalic consonant and reduction of CV timing in the word-medial cluster case compared to its singleton paired word in both stop-lateral and s-stop clusters, early vowel initiation (as permitted by the clusters' phonetic properties), and presence of compensatory relations between phonetic properties of different segments or intersegmental transitions within each cluster. In other words, we find that the global organization presiding over the segments partaking in these word-medial tautosyllabic CCVs is pleiotropic, that is, simultaneously expressed in multiple phonetic exponents rather than via a privileged metric such as c-center stability or any other such given single measure employed in previous works.
Discourse Prominence and Antecedent MisRetrieval during Native and Non-Native Pronoun Resolution
(2022)
Previous studies on non-native (L2) anaphor resolution suggest that L2 comprehenders are guided more strongly by discourse-level cues compared to native (L1) comprehenders. Here we examine whether and how a grammatically inappropriate antecedent’s discourse status affects the likelihood of it being considered during L1 and L2 pronoun resolution. We used an interference paradigm to examine how the extrasentential discourse impacts the resolution of German object pronouns. In an eye-tracking-during-reading experiment we examined whether an elaborated local antecedent ruled out by binding Condition B would be mis-retrieved during pronoun resolution, and whether initially introducing this antecedent as the discourse topic would affect the chances of it being mis-retrieved. While both participant groups rejected the inappropriate antecedent in an offline questionnaire irrespective of its discourse prominence, their real-time processing patterns differed. L1 speakers initially mis-retrieved the inappropriate antecedent regardless of its contextual prominence. L1 Russian/L2 German speakers, in contrast, were affected by the antecedent’s discourse status, considering it only when it was discourse-new but not when it had previously been introduced as the discourse topic. Our findings show that L2 comprehenders are highly sensitive to discourse dynamics such as topic shifts, supporting the claim that discourse-level cues are more strongly weighted during L2 compared to L1 processing.
What is the processing cost of being garden-pathed by a temporary syntactic ambiguity? We argue that comparing average reading times in garden-path versus non-garden-path sentences is not enough to answer this question. Trial-level contaminants such as inattention, the fact that garden pathing may occur non-deterministically in the ambiguous condition, and "triage" (rejecting the sentence without reanalysis; Fodor & Inoue, 2000) lead to systematic underestimates of the true cost of garden pathing. Furthermore, the "pure" garden-path effect due to encountering an unexpected word needs to be separated from the additional cost of syntactic reanalysis. To get more realistic estimates for the individual processing costs of garden pathing and syntactic reanalysis, we implement a novel computational model that includes trial-level contaminants as probabilistically occurring latent cognitive processes. The model shows a good predictive fit to existing reading time and judgment data. Furthermore, the latent-process approach captures differences between noun phrase/zero complement (NP/Z) garden-path sentences and semantically biased reduced relative clause (RRC) garden-path sentences: The NP/Z garden path occurs nearly deterministically but can be mostly eliminated by adding a comma. By contrast, the RRC garden path occurs with a lower probability, but disambiguation via semantic plausibility is not always effective.
When researchers carry out a null hypothesis significance test, it is tempting to assume that a statistically significant result lowers Prob(H0), the probability of the null hypothesis being true. Technically, such a statement is meaningless for various reasons: e.g., the null hypothesis does not have a probability associated with it. However, it is possible to relax certain assumptions to compute the posterior probability Prob(H0) under repeated sampling. We show in a step-by-step guide that the intuitively appealing belief, that Prob(H0) is low when significant results have been obtained under repeated sampling, is in general incorrect and depends greatly on: (a) the prior probability of the null being true; (b) type-I error rate, (c) type-II error rate, and (d) replication of a result. Through step-by-step simulations using open-source code in the R System of Statistical Computing, we show that uncertainty about the null hypothesis being true often remains high despite a significant result. To help the reader develop intuitions about this common misconception, we provide a Shiny app (https://danielschad.shinyapps.io/probnull/). We expect that this tutorial will help researchers better understand and judge results from null hypothesis significance tests.
Pseudonyms as carriers of contextualised threat in 19th-century Irish English threatening notices
(2021)
This paper explores functions of pseudonyms in written threatening communication from a cognitive sociolinguistic perspective. It addresses the semantic domains present in pseudonyms in a corpus of 19th-century Irish English threatening notices and their cognitive functions in the construction of both cultural-contextualised threat and the threatener's identity. We identify eight semantic domains that are accessed recurrently in order to create threat. Contributing to the notion of threat involves menacing war, violence, darkness and perdition directly, while also constructing a certain persona for the threatener that highlights their motivation, moral superiority, historical, local and circumstantial expertise, and their physical and mental aptitude. We argue that pseudonyms contribute to the deontic force of the threat by accessing cultural categories and schemas as well as conceptual metaphors and metonymies. Finally, we suggest that pseudonyms function as post-positioned semantic frame setters, providing a cognitive lens through which the entire threatening notice must be interpreted.
This thesis is concerned with the phenomenon of quantifier scope ambiguities. This phenomenon has been researched extensively, both from a theoretical and from an empirical point of view. Nevertheless, there are still a number of under-researched topics in the field of quantifier scope, which will be the main focus of this thesis. I will take a closer look at three languages, English, German, and the Asante Twi dialect of Akan (Kwa, Niger-Kongo). The goal is a better understanding of the phenomenon of quantifier scope both within each language, as well as from a cross-linguistic perspective. First, this thesis will provide a series of experiments that allow a direct cross-linguistic comparison between English and German – two languages about which specific claims have been made in the literature. I will also provide exploratory research in the case of Asante Twi, where so far, no work has been dedicated specifically to the study of quantifier scope. The work on Asante Twi will go beyond quantifier scope and also target the quantifier and determiner system in general. The question is not only if particular scope readings are possible or not, but also which factors contribute to an increase or decrease of scope availability, and if there are factors that block certain scope readings altogether. While some of the results confirm and thereby strengthen previous claims, other results contradict general assumptions in the literature. This is particularly the case for inverse readings in German and inverse readings across clause-boundaries.
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.
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.
During reading or listening, people can generate predictions about the lexical and morphosyntactic properties of upcoming input based on available context. Psycholinguistic experiments that study predictability or control for it conventionally rely on a human-based approach and estimate predictability via the cloze task. Our study investigated an alternative corpus-based approach for estimating predictability via language predictability models. We obtained cloze and corpus-based probabilities for all words in 144 Russian sentences, correlated the two measures, and found a strong correlation between them. Importantly, we estimated how much variance in eye movements registered while reading the same sentences was explained by each of the two probabilities and whether the two probabilities explain the same variance. Along with lexical predictability (the activation of a particular word form), we analyzed morphosyntactic predictability (the activation of morphological features of words) and its effect on reading times over and above lexical predictability. We found that for predicting reading times, cloze and corpus-based measures of both lexical and morphosyntactic predictability explained the same amount of variance. However, cloze and corpus-based lexical probabilities both independently contributed to a better model fit, whereas for morphosyntactic probabilities, the contributions of cloze and corpus-based measures were interchangeable. Therefore, morphosyntactic but not lexical corpus-based probabilities can substitute for cloze probabilities in reading experiments. Our results also indicate that in languages with rich inflectional morphology, such as Russian, when people engage in prediction, they are much more successful in predicting isolated morphosyntactic features than predicting the particular lexeme and its full morphosyntactic markup.
Many human infants grow up learning more than one language simultaneously but only recently has research started to study early language acquisition in this population more systematically. The paper gives an overview on findings on early language acquisition in bilingual infants during the first two years of life and compares these findings to current knowledge on early language acquisition in monolingual infants. Given the state of the research, the overview focuses on research on phonological and early lexical development in the first two years of life. We will show that the developmental trajectory of early language acquisition in these areas is very similar in mono- and bilingual infants suggesting that these early steps into language are guided by mechanisms that are rather robust against the differences in the conditions of language exposure that mono- and bilingual infants typically experience.
Using articulatory data from five German speakers, we study how segmental sequences under different syllabic organizations respond to perturbations of phonetic parameters in the segments that compose them. Target words contained stop-lateral sequences /bl, gl, kl, pl/ in word-initial and cross-word contexts and were embedded in carrier phrases with different prosodic boundaries, i.e., no phrase boundary versus an utterance phrase boundary preceded the target word in the case of word-initial clusters, or separated the consonants in the case of cross-word sequences. For word-initial cluster (CCV) onsets, we find that increasing C1 stop duration or the lag between two consonants leads to earlier vowel initiation and reduced local timing stability across CV, CCV. Furthermore, as the inter-consonantal lag increases, C2 duration decreases. In contrast, for cross-word C#CV sequences, increasing inter-consonantal lag does not lead to earlier vowel initiation and robust local timing stability is maintained across CV, C#CV. In other words, in CCV sequences within words, local perturbations to segments have effects that ripple through the rest of the sequence. Instead, in cross-word C#CV sequences, local perturbations stay local. Overall, the findings indicate that the effects of phonetic perturbations on coordination patterns depend on the syllabic organization superimposed on these clusters.
This study provides a novel approach for testing the universality of perceptual biases by looking at speech processing in simultaneous bilingual adults learning two languages that support the maintenance of this bias to different degrees. Specifically, we investigated the Iambic/Trochaic Law, an assumed universal grouping bias, in simultaneous French-German bilinguals, presenting them with streams of syllables varying in intensity, duration or neither and asking them whether they perceived them as strong-weak or weak-strong groupings. Results showed robust, consistent grouping preferences. A comparison to monolinguals from previous studies revealed that they pattern with German-speaking monolinguals, and differ from French-speaking monolinguals. The distribution of simultaneous bilinguals' individual performance was best explained by a model fitting a unimodal (not bimodal) distribution, failing to support two subgroups of language dominance. Moreover, neither language experience nor language context predicted their performance. These findings suggest a special role for universal biases in simultaneous bilinguals.
In successful communication, the literal meaning of linguistic utterances is often enriched by pragmatic inferences. Part of the pragmatic reasoning underlying such inferences has been successfully modeled as Bayesian goal recognition in the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In this paper, we try to model the interpretation of question-answer sequences with narrow focus in the answer in the RSA framework, thereby exploring the effects of domain size and prior probabilities on interpretation. Should narrow focus exhaustivity inferences be actually based on Bayesian inference involving prior probabilities of states, RSA models should predict a dependency of exhaustivity on these factors. We present experimental data that suggest that interlocutors do not act according to the predictions of the RSA model and that exhaustivity is in fact approximately constant across different domain sizes and priors. The results constitute a conceptual challenge for Bayesian accounts of the underlying pragmatic inferences.
A growing body of experimental syntactic research has revealed substantial variation in the magnitude of island effects, not only across languages but also across different grammatical constructions. Adopting a well-established experimental design, the present study examines island effects in Spanish using a speeded acceptability judgment task. To quantify variation across grammatical constructions, we tested extraction from four different types of structure (subjects, complex noun phrases, adjuncts and interrogative clauses). The results of Bayesian mixed effects modelling showed that the size of island effects varied between constructions, such that there was clear evidence of subject, adjunct and interrogative island effects, but not of complex noun phrase island effects. We also failed to find evidence that island effects were modulated by participants' working memory capacity as measured by an operation span task. To account for our results, we suggest that variability in island effects across constructions may be due to the interaction of syntactic, semantic-pragmatic and processing factors, which may affect island types differentially due to their idiosyncratic properties.
Substantial research has examined cognition in aging bilinguals. However, less work has investigated the effects of aging on language itself in bilingualism. In this article I comprehensively review prior research on this topic, and interpret the evidence in light of current theories of aging and theories of bilingualism. First, aging indeed appears to affect bilinguals' language performance, though there is considerable variability in the trajectory across adulthood (declines, age-invariance, and improvements) and in the extent to which these trajectories resemble those found in monolinguals. I argue that these age effects are likely explained by the key opposing forces of increasing experience and cognitive declines in aging. Second, consistent with some theoretical work on bilingual language processing, the grammatical processing mechanisms do not seem to change between younger and older bilingual adults, even after decades of immersion. I conclude by discussing how future research can further advance the field.
The attentional bias to negative information enables humans to quickly identify and to respond appropriately to potentially threatening situations. Because of its adaptive function, the enhanced sensitivity to negative information is expected to represent a universal trait, shared by all humans regardless of their cultural background. However, existing research focuses almost exclusively on humans from Western industrialized societies, who are not representative for the human species. Therefore, we compare humans from two distinct cultural contexts: adolescents and children from Germany, a Western industrialized society, and from the not equal Akhoe Hai parallel to om, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers in Namibia. We predicted that both groups show an attentional bias toward negative facial expressions as compared to neutral or positive faces. We used eye-tracking to measure their fixation duration on facial expressions depicting different emotions, including negative (fear, anger), positive (happy), and neutral faces. Both Germans and the not equal Akhoe Hai parallel to om gazed longer at fearful faces, but shorter on angry faces, challenging the notion of a general bias toward negative emotions. For happy faces, fixation durations varied between the two groups, suggesting more flexibility in the response to positive emotions. Our findings emphasize the need for placing research on emotion perception into an evolutionary, cross-cultural comparative framework that considers the adaptive significance of specific emotions, rather than differentiating between positive and negative information, and enables systematic comparisons across participants from diverse cultural backgrounds.
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.
The interpretation of negated antonyms is characterised by a polarity asymmetry: the negation of a positive polarity antonym (X is not interesting) is more likely to be strengthened to convey its opposite ('X is uninteresting') than the negation of a negative polarity antonym (X is not uninteresting to convey that 'X is interesting') is. A classical explanation of this asymmetry relies on face-management. Since the predication of a negative polarity antonym (X is uninteresting) is potentially face-threatening in most contexts, the negation of the corresponding positive polarity antonym (X is not interesting) is more likely to be interpreted as an indirect strategy to minimise face-threat while getting the message across. We present two experimental studies in which we test the predictions of this explanation. In contrast with it, our results show that adjectival polarity, but not face-threatening potential, appears to be responsible for the asymmetric interpretation of negated antonyms.
Comparisons of equality with German so ... wie, and the relationship between degrees and properties
(2021)
We present a compositionally transparent, unified semantic analysis of two kinds of so ... wie-equative constructions in German, namely degree equatives and property equatives in the domain of individuals or events. Unlike in English and many other European languages (Haspelmath & Buchholz 1998, Rett 2013), both equative types in German feature the parameter marker so, suggesting a unified analysis. We show that the parallel formal expression of German degree and property equatives is accompanied by a parallel syntactic distribution (in predicative, attributive, and adverbial position), and by identical semantic properties: Both equative types allow for scope ambiguities, show negative island effects out of context, and license the negative polarity item uberhaupt 'at all' in the complement clause. As the same properties are also shared by German comparatives, we adopt the influential quantificational analysis of comparatives in von Stechow (1984ab), Heim (1985, 2001, 2007), and Beck (2011), and treat both German equative types in a uniform manner as expressing universal quantification over sets of degrees or over sets of properties (of individuals or events). Conceptually, the uniform marking of degree-related and property-related meanings is expected given that the abstract semantic category degree (type ) can be reconstructed in terms of equivalence classes, i.e., ontologically simpler sets of individuals (type ) or events (type ). These are found in any language, showing that whether or not a language makes explicit reference to degrees (by means of gradable adjectives, degree question words, degree-only equatives) does not follow on general conceptual or semantic grounds, but is determined by the grammar of that language.
We present computational modeling results based on a self-paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k-fold cross-validation. We find that our data are better accounted for by an encoding-based model of agreement attraction, compared to a retrieval-based model. A novel methodological contribution of our study is the use of comprehension questions with open-ended responses, so that both misinterpretation of the number feature of the subject phrase and misassignment of the thematic subject role of the verb can be investigated at the same time. We find evidence for both types of misinterpretation in our study, sometimes in the same trial. However, the specific error patterns in our data are not fully consistent with any previously proposed model.
Apples and oranges
(2021)
Despite scarce empirical evidence, introducing new vocabulary in semantic categories has long been standard in second language teaching. We examined the effect of learning context on encoding, immediate recall and integration of new vocabulary into semantic memory by contrasting categorically related (novel names for familiar concepts blocked by semantic category) and unrelated (mixed semantic categories) learning contexts. Two learning sessions were conducted 24 hours apart, with each participant exposed to both contexts. Subsequently, a test phase examined picture naming, translation and picture-word interference tasks. Compared to the unrelated context, the categorically related context resulted in poorer naming accuracy in the learning phase, slower response latencies at the immediate recall tasks and greater semantic interference in the picture-word interference task (picture naming in L1 with semantically related novel word distractors). We develop a theoretical account of word learning that attributes observed differences to episodic rather than semantic memory.
Preregistration is an open science practice that requires the specification of research hypotheses and analysis plans before the data are inspected. Here, we discuss the benefits of preregistration for hypothesis-driven, confirmatory bilingualism research. Using examples from psycholinguistics and bilingualism, we illustrate how non-peer reviewed preregistrations can serve to implement a clean distinction between hypothesis testing and data exploration. This distinction helps researchers avoid casting post-hoc hypotheses and analyses as confirmatory ones. We argue that, in keeping with current best practices in the experimental sciences, preregistration, along with sharing data and code, should be an integral part of hypothesis-driven bilingualism research.
Perceptuomotor compatibility between phonemically identical spoken and perceived syllables has been found to speed up response times (RTs) in speech production tasks. However, research on compatibility effects between perceived and produced stimuli at the subphonemic level is limited. Using a cue-distractor task, we investigated the effects of phonemic and subphonemic congruency in pairs of vowels. On each trial, a visual cue prompted individuals to produce a response vowel, and after the visual cue appeared a distractor vowel was auditorily presented while speakers were planning to produce the response vowel. The results revealed effects on RTs due to phonemic congruency (same vs. different vowels) between the response and distractor vowels, which resemble effects previously seen for consonants. Beyond phonemic congruency, we assessed how RTs are modulated as a function of the degree of subphonemic similarity between the response and distractor vowels. Higher similarity between the response and distractor in terms of phonological distance-defined by number of mismatching phonological features-resulted in faster RTs. However, the exact patterns of RTs varied across response-distractor vowel pairs. We discuss how different assumptions about phonological feature representations may account for the different patterns observed in RTs across response-distractor pairs. Our findings on the effects of perceived stimuli on produced speech at a more detailed level of representation than phonemic identity necessitate a more direct and specific formulation of the perception-production link. Additionally, these results extend previously reported perceptuomotor interactions mainly involving consonants to vowels.
In the present study, we investigated younger and older Persian preschoolers' response tendency and accuracy toward yes/no questions about a coloring activity. Overall, 107 three- to four-year-olds and five- to six-year-old children were asked positive and negative yes/no questions about a picture coloring activity. The questions focused on three question contents namely, actions, environment and person. As for children's response tendency, they showed a compliance tendency. That is, they provided yes and no responses to positively and negatively formed questions respectively. Children especially younger ones were more compliant toward positive questions and their tendency decreased by age. In addition, the results revealed children's highest rate of compliance tendency toward environment inquiries. Concerning response accuracy, the effects of age and question content were significant. Specifically, older children provided more accurate responses than their younger counterparts, especially to yes/no questions asked about the actions performed during the activity. The findings suggest that depending on the format and the content of yes/no questions younger and older children's response accuracy and tendency differ.