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Wird Schon Stimmen!
(2018)
The article puts forward a novel analysis of the German modal particle schon as a modal degree operator over propositional content. The proposed analysis offers a uniform perspective on the semantics of modal schon and its aspectual counterpart meaning ‘already’: Both particles are analyzed as denoting a degree operator, expressing a scale-based comparison over relevant alternatives. The alternatives are determined by focus in the case of aspectual schon (Krifka 2000), but are restricted to the polar alternatives p and ¬p in the case of modal schon. Semantically, modal schon introduces a presupposition to the effect that the circumstantial conversational background contains more factual evidence in favor of p than in favor of ¬p, thereby making modal schon the not at-issue counterpart of the overt comparative form eher ‘rather’ (Herburger & Rubinstein 2014). The analysis incorporates basic insights from earlier analyses of modal schon in a novel way, and it also offers new insights as to the underlying workings of modality in natural language as involving propositions rather than possible worlds (Kratzer 1977, 2012).
The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) is used to test higher-level executive functions or switching, depending on the measures chosen in a study and its goal. Many measures can be extracted from the WCST, but how to assign them to specific cognitive skills remains unclear. Thus, the current study first aimed at identifying which measures test the same cognitive abilities. Second, we compared the performance of mono- and multilingual children in the identified abilities because there is some evidence that bilingualism can improve executive functions. We tested 66 monolingual and 56 multilingual (i.e., bi- and trilingual) primary school children (M-age = 109 months) in an online version of the classic WCST. A principal component analysis revealed four factors: problem-solving, monitoring, efficient errors, and perseverations. Because the assignment of measures to factors is only partially coherent across the literature, we identified this as one of the sources of task impurity. In the second part, we calculated regression analyses to test for group differences while controlling for intelligence as a predictor for executive functions and for confounding variables such as age, German lexicon size, and socioeconomic status. Intelligence predicted problem solving and perseverations. In the monitoring component (measured by the reaction times preceding a rule switch), multilinguals outperformed monolinguals, thereby supporting the view that bi- or multilingualism can improve processing speed related to monitoring.
Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit der wissensbasierten Modellierung von Audio-Signal-Klassifikatoren (ASK) für die Bioakustik. Sie behandelt ein interdisziplinäres Problem, das viele Facetten umfasst. Zu diesen gehören artspezifische bioakustische Fragen, mathematisch-algorithmische Details und Probleme der Repräsentation von Expertenwissen. Es wird eine universelle praktisch anwendbare Methode zur wissensbasierten Modellierung bioakustischer ASK dargestellt und evaluiert. Das Problem der Modellierung von ASK wird dabei durchgängig aus KDD-Perspektive (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) betrachtet. Der grundlegende Ansatz besteht darin, mit Hilfe von modifizierten KDD-Methoden und Data-Mining-Verfahren die Modellierung von ASK wesentlich zu erleichtern. Das etablierte KDD-Paradigma wird mit Hilfe eines detaillierten formalen Modells auf den Bereich der Modellierung von ASK übertragen. Neunzehn elementare KDD-Verfahren bilden die Grundlage eines umfassenden Systems zur wissensbasierten Modellierung von ASK. Methode und Algorithmen werden evaluiert, indem eine sehr umfangreiche Sammlung akustischer Signale des Großen Tümmlers mit ihrer Hilfe untersucht wird. Die Sammlung wurde speziell für diese Arbeit in Eilat (Israel) angefertigt. Insgesamt werden auf Grundlage dieses Audiomaterials vier empirische Einzelstudien durchgeführt: - Auf der Basis von oszillographischen und spektrographischen Darstellungen wird ein phänomenologisches Klassifikationssystem für die vielfältigen Laute des Großen Tümmlers dargestellt. - Mit Hilfe eines Korpus halbsynthetischer Audiodaten werden verschiedene grundlegende Verfahren zur Modellierung und Anwendung von ASK in Hinblick auf ihre Genauigkeit und Robustheit untersucht. - Mit einem speziell entwickelten Clustering-Verfahren werden mehrere Tausend natürliche Pfifflaute des Großen Tümmlers untersucht. Die Ergebnisse werden visualisiert und diskutiert. - Durch maschinelles mustererkennungsbasiertes akustisches Monitoring wird die Emissionsdynamik verschiedener Lauttypen im Verlaufe von vier Wochen untersucht. Etwa 2.5 Millionen Klicklaute werden im Anschluss auf ihre spektralen Charakteristika hin untersucht. Die beschriebene Methode und die dargestellten Algorithmen sind in vielfältiger Hinsicht erweiterbar, ohne dass an ihrer grundlegenden Architektur etwas geändert werden muss. Sie lassen sich leicht in dem gesamten Gebiet der Bioakustik einsetzen. Hiermit besitzen sie auch für angrenzende Disziplinen ein hohes Potential, denn exaktes Wissen über die akustischen Kommunikations- und Sonarsysteme der Tiere wird in der theoretischen Biologie, in den Kognitionswissenschaften, aber auch im praktischen Naturschutz, in Zukunft eine wichtige Rolle spielen.
One of the core issues in psycholinguistic research concerns the relationship between word category information and verb-argument structure (e.g. transitivity) information of verbs in the process of sentence parsing. In two experiments (visual versus auditory presentation) using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we addressed this question by presenting sentences in which the critical word simultaneously realized both a word category and a transitivity violation. ERPs for sentences with both types of violation clustered with the patterns for sentences with a word category violation only, but were different from the patterns elicited by argument structure violations in isolation, since only the latter elicited an N400 ERP component. The finding that an argument structure violation evoked an N400 only if the phrase structure of the respective sentence was correct suggests that a successful integration of the word category information of a verb functionally precedes the application of its argument structure information. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Electrophysiological research using verbal response paradigms faces the problem of muscle artifacts that occur during speech production or in the period preceding articulation. In this context, this paper has two related aims. The first is to show how the nature of the first phoneme influences the alignment of the ERPs. The second is to further characterize the EEG signal around the onset of articulation, both in temporal and frequency domains. Participants were asked to name aloud pictures of common objects. We applied microstate analyses and time-frequency transformations of ERPs locked to vocal onset to compare the EEG signal between voiced and unvoiced labial plosive word onset consonants. We found a delay of about 40 ms in the set of stable topographic patterns for /b/ relative to /p/ onset words. A similar shift was observed in the power increase of gamma oscillations (30-50 Hz), which had an earlier onset for /p/ trials (similar to 150 ms before vocal onset). This 40-ms shift is consistent with the length of the voiced proportion of the acoustic signal prior to the release of the closure in the vocal responses. These results demonstrate that phonetic features are an important parameter affecting response-locked ERPs, and hence that the onset of the acoustic energy may not be an optimal trigger for synchronizing the EEG activity to the response in vocal paradigms. The indexes explored in this study provide a step forward in the characterization of muscle-related artifacts in electrophysiological studies of speech and language production.
Georgian is famous for its word order flexibility: all permutations of constituent order are possible and the choice among them is primarily determined by information structure. In this paper, we show that word order is not the only means to encode information structure in this language, but it is used in combination with sentence prosody. After a preliminary description of the use of prosodic phrasing and intonation for this purpose, we address the question of the interrelation between these two strategies. Based on experimental evidence, we investigate the interaction of focus with word order and prosody, and we conclude that some aspects of word order variation are pragmatically vacuous and can be accommodated in any context if they are realized with an appropriate prosodic structure, while other word order phenomena are quite restrictive and cannot be overridden through prosodic manipulations.
We report two corpus analyses to examine the impact of animacy, definiteness, givenness and type of referring expression on the ordering of double objects in the spontaneous speech of German-speaking two- to four-year-old children and the child-directed speech of their mothers. The first corpus analysis revealed that definiteness, givenness and type of referring expression influenced word order variation in child language and child-directed speech when the type of referring expression distinguished between pronouns and lexical noun phrases. These results correspond to previous child language studies in English (e.g., de Marneffe et al. 2012). Extending the scope of previous studies, our second corpus analysis examined the role of different pronoun types on word order. It revealed that word order in child language and child-directed speech was predictable from the types of pronouns used. Different types of pronouns were associated with different sentence positions but also showed a strong correlation to givenness and definiteness. Yet, the distinction between pronoun types diminished the effects of givenness so that givenness had an independent impact on word order only in child-directed speech but not in child language. Our results support a multi-factorial approach to word order in German. Moreover, they underline the strong impact of the type of referring expression on word order and suggest that it plays a crucial role in the acquisition of the factors influencing word order variation.
This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the children produced mainly agent-initial constructions regardless of voice. This agent-initial preference, despite the lack of a close link between the agent and the subject in Tagalog, shows that this word order preference is not merely syntactically-driven (subject-initial preference). Additionally, the children’s agent-initial preference in the agent voice, contrary to the adults’ lack of preference, shows that children do not respect the subject-last principle of ordering Tagalog full noun phrases. These results suggest that language-specific optional features like a subject-last principle take longer to be acquired.
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.
Recent research has shown that the early lexical representations children establish in their second year of life already seem to be phonologically detailed enough to allow differentiation from very similar forms. In contrast to these findings children with specific language impairment show problems in discriminating phonologically similar word forms up to school age. In our study we investigated the question whether there would be differences in the processing of phonological details in normally developing and in children with low language performance in the second year of life. This was done by a retrospective study in which in the processing of phonological details was tested by a preferential looking experiment when the children were 19 months old. At the age of 30 months children were tested with a standardized German test of language comprehension and production (SETK2). The preferential looking data at 19 months revealed an opposite reaction pattern for the two groups: while the children scoring normally in the SETK2 increase their fixations of a pictured object only when it was named with the correct word, children with later low language performance did so only when presented with a phonologically slightly deviant mispronunciation. We suggest that this pattern does not point to a specific deficit in processing phonological information in these children but might be related to an instability of early phonological representations, and/or a generalized problem of information processing as compared to typically developing children.
There is evidence that infants start extracting words from fluent speech around 7.5 months of age (e.g., Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995) and that they use at least two mechanisms to segment words forms from fluent speech: prosodic information (e.g., Jusczyk, Cutler & Redanz, 1993) and statistical information (e.g., Saffran, Aslin & Newport, 1996). However, how these two mechanisms interact and whether they change during development is still not fully understood.
The main aim of the present work is to understand in what way different cues to word segmentation are exploited by infants when learning the language in their environment, as well as to explore whether this ability is related to later language skills. In Chapter 3 we pursued to determine the reliability of the method used in most of the experiments in the present thesis (the Headturn Preference Procedure), as well as to examine correlations and individual differences between infants’ performance and later language outcomes. In Chapter 4 we investigated how German-speaking adults weigh statistical and prosodic information for word segmentation. We familiarized adults with an auditory string in which statistical and prosodic information indicated different word boundaries and obtained both behavioral and pupillometry responses. Then, we conducted further experiments to understand in what way different cues to word segmentation are exploited by 9-month-old German-learning infants (Chapter 5) and by 6-month-old German-learning infants (Chapter 6). In addition, we conducted follow-up questionnaires with the infants and obtained language outcomes at later stages of development.
Our findings from this thesis revealed that (1) German-speaking adults show a strong weight of prosodic cues, at least for the materials used in this study and that (2) German-learning infants weight these two kind of cues differently depending on age and/or language experience. We observed that, unlike English-learning infants, 6-month-old infants relied more strongly on prosodic cues. Nine-month-olds do not show any preference for either of the cues in the word segmentation task. From the present results it remains unclear whether the ability to use prosodic cues to word segmentation relates to later language vocabulary. We speculate that prosody provides infants with their first window into the specific acoustic regularities in the signal, which enables them to master the specific stress pattern of German rapidly. Our findings are a step forwards in the understanding of an early impact of the native prosody compared to statistical learning in early word segmentation.
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.