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Dutch allows for variation as to whether the first position in the sentence is occupied by the subject or by some other constituent, such as the direct object. In particular situations, however, this commonly observed variation in word order is ‘frozen’ and only the subject appears in first position. We hypothesize that this partial freezing of word order in Dutch can be explained from the dependence of the speaker’s choice of word order on the hearer’s interpretation of this word order. A formal model of this interaction between the speaker’s perspective and the hearer’s perspective is presented in terms of bidirectional Optimality Theory. Empirical predictions of this model regarding the interaction between word order and definiteness are confirmed by a quantitative corpus study.
Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty, but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers' eye fixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses as new words are integrated; and retrieval, which quantifies comprehension difficulty in terms of working memory constraints. We examine the predictions of both metrics using a family of dependency parsers indexed by an upper limit on the number of candidate syntactic analyses they retain at successive words. Surprisal models all fixation measures and regression probability. By contrast, retrieval does not model any measure in serial processing. As more candidate analyses are considered in parallel at each word, retrieval can account for the same measures as surprisal. This pattern suggests an important role for ranked parallelism in theories of sentence comprehension.
Speech perception requires rapid extraction of the linguistic content from the acoustic signal. The ability to efficiently process rapid changes in auditory information is important for decoding speech and thereby crucial during language acquisition. Investigating functional networks of speech perception in infancy might elucidate neuronal ensembles supporting perceptual abilities that gate language acquisition. Interhemispheric specializations for language have been demonstrated in infants. How these asymmetries are shaped by basic temporal acoustic properties is under debate. We recently provided evidence that newborns process non-linguistic sounds sharing temporal features with language in a differential and lateralized fashion. The present study used the same material while measuring brain responses of 6 and 3 month old infants using simultaneous recordings of electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). NIRS reveals that the lateralization observed in newborns remains constant over the first months of life. While fast acoustic modulations elicit bilateral neuronal activations, slow modulations lead to right-lateralized responses. Additionally, auditory-evoked potentials and oscillatory EEG responses show differential responses for fast and slow modulations indicating a sensitivity for temporal acoustic variations. Oscillatory responses reveal an effect of development, that is, 6 but not 3 month old infants show stronger theta-band desynchronization for slowly modulated sounds. Whether this developmental effect is due to increasing fine-grained perception for spectrotemporal sounds in general remains speculative. Our findings support the notion that a more general specialization for acoustic properties can be considered the basis for lateralization of speech perception. The results show that concurrent assessment of vascular based imaging and electrophysiological responses have great potential in the research on language acquisition.
Background: In addition to the canonical subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, German also allows for non-canonical order (OVS), and the case-marking system supports thematic role interpretation. Previous eye-tracking studies (Kamide et al., 2003; Knoeferle, 2007) have shown that unambiguous case information in non-canonical sentences is processed incrementally. For individuals with agrammatic aphasia, comprehension of non-canonical sentences is at chance level (Burchert et al., 2003). The trace deletion hypothesis (Grodzinsky 1995, 2000) claims that this is due to structural impairments in syntactic representations, which force the individual with aphasia (IWA) to apply a guessing strategy. However, recent studies investigating online sentence processing in aphasia (Caplan et al., 2007; Dickey et al., 2007) found that divergences exist in IWAs' sentence-processing routines depending on whether they comprehended non-canonical sentences correctly or not, pointing rather to a processing deficit explanation. Aims: The aim of the current study was to investigate agrammatic IWAs' online and offline sentence comprehension simultaneously in order to reveal what online sentence-processing strategies they rely on and how these differ from controls' processing routines. We further asked whether IWAs' offline chance performance for non-canonical sentences does indeed result from guessing. Methods Procedures: We used the visual-world paradigm and measured eye movements (as an index of online sentence processing) of controls (N = 8) and individuals with aphasia (N = 7) during a sentence-picture matching task. Additional offline measures were accuracy and reaction times. Outcomes Results: While the offline accuracy results corresponded to the pattern predicted by the TDH, IWAs' eye movements revealed systematic differences depending on the response accuracy. Conclusions: These findings constitute evidence against attributing IWAs' chance performance for non-canonical structures to mere guessing. Instead, our results support processing deficit explanations and characterise the agrammatic parser as deterministic and inefficient: it is slowed down, affected by intermittent deficiencies in performing syntactic operations, and fails to compute reanalysis even when one is detected.
Both the seat of the German government and the capitol of queer German culture, Berlin has been that spatial nexus of politics, sexuality and gender, work and leisure that has enabled the development of multifarious sexual and gender identities. This has caused celebration and consternation among Germans and foreigners alike. Contemporary studies of urban homosexual space cite an erosion of its 'authenticity' when cities market homosexual space in order to attract tourists. My literary analysis shows that Berlin's homosexual male culture and space had already been subject to commoditisation in the Weimar period (1918-1933), when Berliners discovered marketing potential in the French slight la vice allemand [the German vice] - male homosexuality. This article's examination of Weimar Berlin's spatial binary as 'sexy space' and 'sexualised place' in literature by Klaus Mann and Curt Moreck engages with current debates in leisure studies on the gendering and sexing of geography and leisure. Central to this re-evaluation of leisure and tourism in Weimar Berlin is my discussion of flanerie: the figure of the flaneuse indicates that flanerie was not the lone dominion of heterosexual men. In the context of urban leisure and male homosexuality, I argue that Weimar Berlin consistently and successfully negotiated its dual function of sexy space (allowing self-fashioning for homosexual men in Berlin) and sexualised place (voyeurism and sexual exploration for Berlin's newcomers and tourists).
Background: While the role of the right hemisphere (RH) in prosodic processing is prominent, research on the perception of lexical tones has shown that left hemisphere damaged (LHD) patients are more impaired than right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients. Dichotic listening and imaging studies with healthy speakers of tone languages demonstrate that at least at the phonemic and lexical level, prosody is processed in the left hemisphere (LH) when the variations in pitch are phonemically distinctive. There is no report available yet on the perceptual discrimination of a Bantu language in patients after unilateral brain damage. Aims: We addressed the question of how well Shona aphasic patients and right hemisphere damaged patients perceive pitch contrasts in Shona lexical words and also in their homologous low-pass filtered counterparts. We also sought to discover the validity of the current hypotheses on hemispheric lateralisation particularly the hypothesis on hemispheric lateralisation based on language function to account for the Shona data. Methods Procedures: A total of 7 LHD and 7 RHD patients and 14 healthy controls participated in two discrimination tasks that examined perception of lexical tone in (a) bisyllabic Shona words and (b) low-pass filtered stimuli. In both tasks the participants were tasked with judging the pitch as the same or different in 120 bisyllabic words and 120 low-pass filtered stimuli. Outcomes Results: The results demonstrated that the tonal discrimination of the LHD group was more reduced in comparison to the RHD group and control participants. However, the performance of the RHD patients was not error free relative to the control participants, although significantly better than the LHD patients in both tasks. Conclusions: At least for the phonemic and lexical levels, brain damage to the dominant hemisphere results in lexical tone impairment for LHD patients, and cognitive load processing results in a subdued but good performance for RHD patients. The LH is therefore dominant for processing tone when it is lexically distinctive.
This article presents several acceptability rating experiments concerned with crossing wh-movement in German multiple questions. Our results show that there is no general superiority effect in German, thus refuting claims to the contrary by Featherston (2005). However, acceptability is reduced when a wh-phrase crosses a wh-subject with which it agrees in animacy. We explain this finding in terms of the availability of different sorting keys for the answers to the multiple questions.
Background: The issue of production and perception of lexical tone in patients with brain lesions has been investigated mainly through East Asian languages and Norwegian. The present study investigated the lateralisation of lexical tone in Shona, a Bantu language. Van Lancker (1980) proposed a continuum scale of the levels of functional pitch in the speech signal. According to the functional lateralisation account (FLH), the left hemisphere (LH) is associated with highly structured pitch contrasts, such as phonological tone, whereas the right hemisphere (RH) is specialised for the least structured pitch functions cueing emotional and personal information. The extant data show that the ability to produce and identify lexical tone is frequently more impaired as a result of lesions to the LH than RH lesions.
Aims: The present investigation focused on the lateralisation of lexical tone in Shona speakers. The study sought to validate if the scale of hemispheric lateralisation as proposed by Van Lancker (1980) is also valid for Shona, a Bantu language.
Methods & Procedures: We examined five LH damaged (LHD) patients and five RH (RHD) damaged patients using a confrontational picture-naming task and a lexical tone identification task of Shona lexical tone. The first experiment investigated the ability of LHD patients and RHD patients to identify Shona lexical tone in 60 disyllabic minimal pairs. The second experiment examined the ability of Shona brain-damaged patients to produce lexical tone using a confrontational picture-naming task with 120 lexical items.
Outcomes & Results: We observed a dissociation in the performance of both the LHD and RHD patients in the two tasks. Both groups were impaired in the tone identification task relative to the non-brain-damaged controls. However, RHD patients performed significantly better than the LHD patients in the tone identification task. On the other hand, both LHD and RHD groups were equally impaired in the tone production task in comparison to the controls.
Conclusions: The discrepancy in the production and perception of Shona lexical tone for this group of brain-damaged patients shows that, although the two modes are related, they do not always get disrupted at the same level after brain damage. The results from the tone identification task suggest to a certain extent that the FLH is also valid for Shona. In order to account for all the data there is need to carefully consider alternative accounts like the acoustic cue hypothesis (Van Lancker & Sidtis, 1992).
The grammatical expression of focus in West Chadic variation and uniformity in and across languages
(2011)
The article provides an overview of the grammatical realization of focus in four West Chadic languages (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic). The languages discussed exhibit an intriguing crosslinguistic variation in the realization of focus, both among themselves as well as compared to European intonation languages. They also display language-internal variation in the formal realization of focus. The West Chadic languages differ widely in their ways of expressing focus, which range from syntactic over prosodic to morphological devices. In contrast to European intonation languages, the focus marking systems of the West Chadic languages are inconsistent in that focus is often not grammatically expressed, but these inconsistencies are shown to be systematic. Subject foci (contrastive or not) and contrastive nonsubject foci are always grammatically marked, whereas information focus on nonsubjects need not be marked as such. The absence of formal focus marking supports pragmatic theories of focus in terms of contextual resolution. The special status of focused subjects and contrastive foci is derived from the Contrastive Focus Hypothesis, which requires unexpected foci and unexpected focus contents to be marked as such, together with the assumption that canonical subjects in West Chadic receive a default interpretation as topics. Finally, I discuss certain focus ambiguities which are not attested in intonation languages, nor do they follow on standard accounts of focus marking, but which can be accounted for in terms of constraint interaction in the formal expression of focus.
This paper discusses a hitherto undescribed usage of the particle so as a dedicated focus marker in contemporary German. I discuss grammatical and pragmatic characteristics of this focus marker, supporting my account with natural linguistic data and with controlled experimental evidence showing that so has a significant influence on speakers' understanding of what the focus expression in a sentence is. Against this background, I sketch a possible pragmaticalization path from referential usages of so via hedging to a semantically bleached focus marker, which, unlike particles such as auch 'also'/'too' or nur 'only', does not contribute any additional meaning.
In Czech, German, and many other languages, part of the semantic focus of the utterance can be moved to the left periphery of the clause. The main generalization is that only the leftmost accented part of the semantic focus can be moved. We propose that movement to the left periphery is generally triggered by an unspecific edge feature of C (Chomsky 2008) and its restrictions can be attributed to requirements of cyclic linearization, modifying the theory of cyclic linearization developed by Fox and Pesetsky (2005). The crucial assumption is that structural accent is a direct consequence of being linearized at merge, thus it is indirectly relevant for (locality restrictions on) movement. The absence of structural accent correlates with givenness. Given elements may later receive (topic or contrastive) accents, which accounts for fronting in multiple focus/contrastive topic constructions. Without any additional assumptions, the model can account for movement of pragmatically unmarked elements to the left periphery ('formal fronting', Frey 2005). Crucially, the analysis makes no reference at all to concepts of information structure in the syntax, in line with the claim of Chomsky (2008) that UG specifies no direct link between syntax and information structure.
Fluid intelligence is the ability to think flexibly and to understand abstract relations. People with high fluid intelligence (hi-fluIQ) perform better in analogical reasoning tasks than people with average fluid intelligence (ave-fluIQ). Although previous neuroimaging studies reported involvement of parietal and frontal brain regions in geometric analogical reasoning (which is a prototypical task for fluid intelligence), however, neuroimaging findings on geometric analogical reasoning in hi-fluIQ are sparse. Furthermore, evidence on the relation between brain activation and intelligence while solving cognitive tasks is contradictory. The present study was designed to elucidate the cerebral correlates of geometric analogical reasoning in a sample of hi-fluIQ and ave-fluIQ high school students. We employed a geometric analogical reasoning task with graded levels of task difficulty and confirmed the involvement of the parieto-frontal network in solving this task. In addition to characterizing the brain regions involved in geometric analogical reasoning in hi-fluIQ and ave-fluIQ, we found that blood oxygenation level dependency (BOLD) signal changes were greater for hi-fluIQ than for ave-fluIQ in parietal brain regions. However, ave-fluIQ showed greater BOLD signal changes in the anterior cingulate cortex and medial frontal gyrus than hi-fluIQ. Thus, we showed that a similar network of brain regions is involved in geometric analogical reasoning in both groups. Interestingly, the relation between brain activation and intelligence is not mono-directional, but rather, it is specific for each brain region. The negative brain activation-intelligence relationship in frontal brain regions in hi-fluIQ goes along with a better behavioral performance and reflects a lower demand for executive monitoring compared to ave-fluIQ individuals. In conclusion, our data indicate that flexibly modulating the extent of regional cerebral activity is characteristic for fluid intelligence.
The aim of this study was to investigate the supralaryngeal control of the production of the Korean three-way contrast in velar stops. First, an EMA-experiment with three Korean speakers was carried out, and the kinematic properties of the tongue back were analyzed (length of the deceleration phase of the movement, peak velocity, peak acceleration, amplitude and duration of the looping movement during consonantal closure, and angle of incidence between tongue and palate at contact onset). To understand the potential motor control mechanisms underlying the production of the three-way contrast, the target hypothesis, which suggests that articulator movements in stops are directed towards a target at or beyond the palate, was evaluated by comparing its predictions with our experimental findings. Evidence was found in support of this hypothesis. Hence, the hypothesis was further explored in a modeling study. The results suggest that variability in the articulatory parameters can be explained by a single control parameter, namely the target position of the tongue. In a third step the Korean velar stops were simulated by varying the target position. The results show that the main trends of the simulated consonants are in good agreement with the experimental findings.
While it is widely acknowledged in the formal semantic literature that both the truth-functional focus particle only and it-clefts convey exhaustiveness, the nature and source of exhaustiveness effects with it-clefts remain contested. We describe a questionnaire study (n = 80) and an event-related brain potentials (ERP) study (n = 16) that investigated the violation of exhaustiveness in German only-foci versus it-clefts. The offline study showed that a violation of exhaustivity with only is less acceptable than the violation with it-clefts, suggesting a difference in the nature of exhaustivity interpretation in the two environments. The ERP-results confirm that this difference can be seen in online processing as well: a violation of exhaustiveness in only-foci elicited a centro-posterior positivity (600-800ms), whereas a violation in it-clefts induced a globally distributed N400 pattern (400-600ms). The positivity can be interpreted as a reanalysis process and more generally as a process of context updating. The N400 effect in it-clefts is interpreted as indexing a cancelation process that is functionally distinct from the only case. The ERP study is, to our knowledge, the first evidence from an online experimental paradigm which shows that the violation of exhaustiveness involves different underlying processes in the two structural environments.
We present a lexicon-based approach to extracting sentiment from text. The Semantic Orientation CALculator (SO-CAL) uses dictionaries of words annotated with their semantic orientation (polarity and strength), and incorporates intensification and negation. SO-CAL is applied to the polarity classification task, the process of assigning a positive or negative label to a text that captures the text's opinion towards its main subject matter. We show that SO-CAL's performance is consistent across domains and on completely unseen data. Additionally, we describe the process of dictionary creation, and our use of Mechanical Turk to check dictionaries for consistency and reliability.
Purpose: The aim of this study was to relate speakers' auditory acuity for the sibilant contrast, their use of motor equivalent trading relationships in producing the sibilant /integral/, and their produced acoustic distance between the sibilants /s/ and /integral/. Specifically, the study tested the hypotheses that during adaptation to a perturbation of vocal-tract shape, high-acuity speakers use motor equivalence strategies to a greater extent than do low-acuity speakers in order to reach their smaller phonemic goal regions, and that high-acuity speakers produce greater acoustic distance between 2 sibilant phonemes than do low-acuity speakers.
Method: Articulographic data from 7 German speakers adapting to a perturbation were analyzed for the use of motor equivalence. The speakers' produced acoustic distance between /s/ and /integral/ was calculated. Auditory acuity was assessed for the same speakers.
Results: High-acuity speakers used motor equivalence to a greater extent when adapting to a perturbation than did low-acuity speakers. Additionally, high-acuity speakers produced greater acoustic contrasts than did low-acuity-speakers. It was observed that speech rate had an influence on the use of motor equivalence: Slow speakers used motor equivalence to a lesser degree than did fast speakers.
Conclusion: These results provide support for the mutual interdependence of speech perception and production.
Most studies investigating the impact of literacy on oral language processing have shown that literacy provides phonological awareness skills in the processing of oral language. The implications of these results on aphasia tests could be significant and pose questions on the adequacy of such tools for testing non-literate individuals. Aiming at examining the impact of literacy on oral language processing and its implication on aphasia tests, this study tested 12 non-literate and 12 literate individuals with a modified Amharic version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (Paradis and Amberber, 1991, Bilingual Aphasia Test. Amharic version. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.). The problems of phonological awareness skills in oral language processing in non-literates are substantiated. In addition, compared with literate participants, non-literate individuals demonstrated difficulties in the word/sentence-picture matching tasks. This study has also revealed that the Amharic version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test may be viable for testing Amharic-speaking non-literate individuals with aphasia when modifications are incorporated.
This article deals with the claim that the MAGNITUDE ESTIMATION (ME) method of gathering acceptability judgments produces data that are more informative for linguists than binary or n-point scale judgments. We performed three acceptability-rating experiments that directly compared ME data to binary and seven-point scale data. The results clearly falsify the hypothesis that data gathered by the ME method carry a larger amount of information about the acceptability of a given linguistic phenomenon. The three measures are largely equivalent with respect to informativity. Moreover, ME judgments are shown to be more liable to producing spurious variance under certain circumstances.*