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This study presents results from a cross-modal priming experiment investigating inflected verb forms of German. A group of late learners of German with Russian as their native language (L1) was compared to a control group of German L1 speakers. The experiment showed different priming patterns for the two participant groups. The L1 German data yielded a stem-priming effect for inflected forms involving regular affixation and a partial priming effect for irregular forms irrespective of stem allomorphy. By contrast, the data from the late bilinguals showed reduced priming effects for both regular and irregular forms. We argue that late learners rely more on lexically stored inflected word forms during word recognition and less on morphological parsing than native speakers.
The current study examines the neural correlates of 8-to-12-year-old children and adults producing inflected word forms, specifically regular vs. irregular past-tense forms in English, using a silent production paradigm. ERPs were time-locked to a visual cue for silent production of either a regular or irregular past-tense form or a 3rd person singular present tense form of a given verb (e.g., walked/sang vs. walks/sings). Subsequently, another visual stimulus cued participants for an overt vocalization of their response. ERP results for the adult group revealed a negativity 300-450 ms after the silent-production cue for regular compared to irregular past-tense forms. There was no difference in the present form condition. Children's brain potentials revealed developmental changes, with the older children demonstrating more adult-like ERP responses than the younger ones. We interpret the observed ERP responses as reflecting combinatorial processing involved in regular (but not irregular) past-tense formation.
In order to re-evaluate the ongoing debate about so-called creole exceptionalism, parallels and continuities from historical texts are shown in a line of argumentation that can be found both in works from the 19th century and from today. Mainly, the influential study of Mauritian Creole by Charles Baissac (1880) exhibits considerable similarities with today's exceptionalist positions. Persisting arguments such as the idea of creoles as "simple", "young" and "natural" languages are (and were) to show the difference of creoles from other languages. Creolists argue that evidence of creoles as a distinct class provides support for the relevance and independence of creolistics as a discipline. Comparing contemporary and historical sources can shed new light on the epistemological heritage of the field.
Multitalker situations confront listeners with a plethora of competing auditory inputs, and hence require selective attention to relevant information, especially when the perceptual saliency of distracting inputs is high. This study augmented the classical forced-attention dichotic listening paradigm by adding an interaural intensity manipulation to investigate developmental differences in the interplay between perceptual saliency and attentional control during auditory processing between early and middle childhood. We found that older children were able to flexibly focus on instructed auditory inputs from either the right or the left ear, overcoming the effects of perceptual saliency. In contrast, younger children implemented their attentional focus less efficiently. Direct comparisons of the present data with data from a recently published study of younger and older adults from our group suggest that younger children and older adults show similar levels of performance. Critically, follow-up comparisons revealed that younger children's performance restrictions reflect difficulties in attentional control only, whereas older adults' performance deficits also reflect an exaggerated reliance on perceptual saliency. We conclude that auditory attentional control improves considerably from middle to late childhood and that auditory attention deficits in healthy aging cannot be reduced to a simple reversal of child developmental improvements.
Response inhibition is an attention function which develops relatively early during childhood. Behavioral data suggest that by the age of 3, children master the basic task requirements for the assessment of response inhibition but performance improves substantially until the age of 7. The neuronal mechanisms underlying these developmental processes, however, are not well understood. In this study, we examined brain activation patterns and behavioral performance of children aged between 4 and 6 years compared to adults by applying a go/no-go paradigm during near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) brain imaging. We furthermore applied task-independent functional connectivity measures to the imaging data to identify maturation of intrinsic neural functional networks. We found a significant group x condition related interaction in terms of inhibition-related reduced right fronto-parietal activation in children compared to adults. In contrast, motor-related activation did not differ between age groups. Functional connectivity analysis revealed that in the children's group, short-range coherence within frontal areas was stronger, and long-range coherence between frontal and parietal areas was weaker, compared to adults. Our findings show that in children aged from 4 to 6 years fronto-parietal brain maturation plays a crucial part in the cognitive development of response inhibition.
In this article, it will be argued that the concept of functional layering - an extension of Hopper's (1991) concept of layering - can be fruitfully applied to understand the mechanisms behind the sometimes large and messy looking synchronic picture of diverse meanings which one and the same construction can fulfill at a particular point in time. The concept will be used to account for the meaning spectrum of the present-day English progressive, which, it will be argued, no monosemic approach to date can account for. Taking a look at the diachrony of the construction will help to reveal that the various "exceptions" found in the use of the progressive can be understood as reflections of different stages in its development. Older, less grammaticalized or less well-defined usage patterns thus often survive in certain restricted niches next to the newer, more grammaticalized or more clear-cut functions, representing different diachronic layers. In addition to this diachronic motivation for synchronic meaning variety, the article will also address the crucial question of how a present-day hearer of a progressive form is able to decode the specific meaning intended by the speaker based on contextual clues. The article ends with some suggestions for further applications of the concept of functional layering.
Eye-movement research on implicit prosody has found effects of lexical stress on syntactic ambiguity resolution, suggesting that metrical well-formedness constraints interact with syntactic category assignment. Building on these findings, the present eyetracking study investigates whether contextual bias can modulate the effects of metrical structure on syntactic ambiguity resolution in silent reading. Contextual bias and potential stress-clash in the ambiguous region were crossed in a 2 x 2 design. Participants read biased context sentences followed by temporarily ambiguous test sentences. In the three-word ambiguous region, main effects of lexical stress were dominant, while early effects of context were absent. Potential stress clash yielded a significant increase in first-pass regressions and re-reading probability across the three words. In the disambiguating region, the disambiguating word itself showed increased processing difficulty (lower skipping and increased re-reading probability) when the disambiguation engendered a stress clash configuration, while the word immediately following showed main effects of context in those same measures. Taken together, effects of lexical stress upon eye movements were swift and pervasive across first-pass and second-pass measures, while effects of context were relatively delayed. These results indicate a strong role for implicit meter in guiding parsing, one that appears insensitive to higher-level constraints. Our findings are problematic for two classes of models, the two-stage garden-path model and the constraint-based competition-integration model, but can be explained by a variation on the two-stage model, the unrestricted race model.
Psycholinguistic research shows that key properties of the human sentence processor are incrementality, connectedness (partial structures contain no unattached nodes), and prediction (upcoming syntactic structure is anticipated). There is currently no broad-coverage parsing model with these properties, however. In this article, we present the first broad-coverage probabilistic parser for PLTAG, a variant of TAG that supports all three requirements. We train our parser on a TAG-transformed version of the Penn Treebank and show that it achieves performance comparable to existing TAG parsers that are incremental but not predictive. We also use our PLTAG model to predict human reading times, demonstrating a better fit on the Dundee eye-tracking corpus than a standard surprisal model.
Much previous experimental research on morphological processing has focused on surface and meaning-level properties of morphologically complex words, without paying much attention to the morphological differences between inflectional and derivational processes. Realization-based theories of morphology, for example, assume specific morpholexical representations for derived words that distinguish them from the products of inflectional or paradigmatic processes. The present study reports results from a series of masked priming experiments investigating the processing of inflectional and derivational phenomena in native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers in a non-Indo-European language, Turkish. We specifically compared regular (Aorist) verb inflection with deadjectival nominalization, both of which are highly frequent, productive and transparent in Turkish. The experiments demonstrated different priming patterns for inflection and derivation, specifically within the L2 group. Implications of these findings are discussed both for accounts of L2 morphological processing and for the controversial linguistic distinction between inflection and derivation.
The purpose of this study is to examine and compare the amount of inter-speaker variability in the articulation of monozygotic twin pairs (MZ), dizygotic twin pairs (DZ), and pairs of unrelated twins with the goal of examining in greater depth the influence of physiology on articulation. Physiological parameters are assumed to be very similar in MZ twin pairs in contrast to DZ twin pairs or unrelated speakers, and it is hypothesized that the speaker specific shape of articulatory looping trajectories of the tongue is at least partly dependent on biomechanical properties and the speaker's individual physiology. By means of electromagnetic articulography (EMA), inter-speaker variability in the looping trajectories of the tongue back during /VCV/ sequences is analyzed. Results reveal similar looping patterns within MZ twin pairs but in DZ pairs differences in the shape of the loop, the direction of the upward and downward movement, and the amount of horizontal sliding movement at the palate are found.
This article presents the results of a study on the interpretation and acceptance of adjectival resultatives of German children between 6 and 9 years of age and adults. These results brought to light significant differences, due to age, in the interpretation and acceptance of these resultatives, that is to say, sentences with an adjective in the final position. The youngest participants were prone to accept ungrammatical sentences by assigning a resultative meaning. The ungrammaticality of the sentences in question was not due to semantic inconsistencies but to violations of the selectional properties of verbs, as for instance in *die Kinder erschrecken die Katze angstlich 'the children frighten the cat scared'. In contrast, the adults rejected or amended those sentences. The conclusion is (a) that the children seemed to rely on the sentence structure as a primary cue to compute the meaning of an utterance and (b) that, in contrast with adults, the youngest children in particular had not yet learned the relevant semantic properties of verbs that determine the selectional restrictions and thus the syntactic options of verbs. This means that differences in interpretation and acceptance of sentences are due to differences in knowledge of semantic verb properties between adults and children. The relevant semantic knowledge increases in gradual stages during language acquisition.