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Wortartige Zwischenfälle
(2004)
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
Untitled
(2004)
This volume offers new arguments and perspectives in the ongoing debate about the optimal analysis of verb movement, mainly, but not exclusively, in German. Fanselow and Meinunger deal with verb second (V2) movement in German main clauses. Fanselow argues that head movement of the substitution type follows the standard minimalist conceptions of Merge and Move and is therefore not subject to the same objections as head movement as head adjunction which violates Chomsky's minimalist extension condition, operates countercyclically, and fails to let the moved head c-command its trace. Fanselow argues for V2 movement as head movement of the substitution type. Meinunger discusses a restriction on V2 movement imposed by phrases like "mehr als" ('more than'), as in "Der Wert hat sich weit mehr als verdreifacht" ('the value has far more than tripled') where V2 movement is ruled out (cf. *"Der Wert verdreifachte sich mehr als"). Meinunger claims that this restriction is best analysed in phonological terms: the preposition/complementiser "als" acts as a prefixal clitic to its host, the finite verb, which therefore may not move without it. With respect to the V2 debate, Meinunger argues for an interface perspective. He shows that V2 is restricted from both the conceptual and the phonological interface. Vogel, finally, discusses the syntax of clause-final verbal complexes and their dialectal variation in German. He compares three different syntactic analyses, a minimalist head movement analysis, a minimalist XP movement analysis, and an Optimality theoretic PF movement analysis. The three accounts are evaluated relative to the additional assumptions they have to make, the complications they face and how they fit the observations. Vogel argues in favour of the phonologically oriented OT analysis because of its ability to create a direct link between the coming about of a particular word order pattern and its basically phonological trigger. Each of the three papers recognises the relevance of surface forms in the analysis of German verb movement. They differ, however in the extent to which phonological aspects take part in the explanations they offer.
Sprachverstehen mit Cochlea-Implantat : EKP-Studien mit postlingual ertaubten erwachsenen CI-Trägern
(2004)
We 'hear words' when we can segment prosodic units from the speech stream and activate associated lexical entries. Segmentation is sometimes regarded in SLA as a perceptual problem, not a grammatical one. I argue here that this view is wrong: segmenting formatives results when we construct prosodic units on the basis of phonetic cues to their edges. The learner's first task is to acquire the relevant cues to these edges. The problem of segmentation is discussed within the framework provided by the Autonomous Induction Theory
We describe an experiment that investigated the failure to license polarity items in German using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The results reveal distinct processing reflexes associated with failure to license positive polarity items in comparison to failure to license negative polarity items. Failure to license both negative and positive polarity items elicited an N400 component reflecting semantic integration cost. Failure to license positive polarity items, however, also elicited a P600 component. The additional P600 in the positive polarity violations may reflect higher processing complexity associated with a negative operator. This difference between the two types of violation suggests that the processing of negative and positive polarity items does not involve identical mechanisms. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
Phonologie des Deutschen
(2004)
Inhalt: Kapitel 1: Phonetische Grundlagen: Akustische Phonetik Kapitel 2: Phonetische Grundlagen: Artikulatorische Phonetik Kapitel 3: Segment und Allophonie Kapitel 4: Distinktive Merkmale Kapitel 5: Die Silbe: prosodische Struktur der Wörter Kapitel 6: Derivationen und OT: die phonologischen Theorien
It is well-known from psycholinguistic literature that the human language processing system exhibits preferences when sentence constituents are ambiguous with respect to their grammatical function. Generally, many theories assume that an interpretation towards the subject is preferred in such cases. Later disambiguations which contradict such a preference induce enhanced processing difficulty (i.e. reanalysis) which reflects itself in late positive deflections (P345/P600) in event-related brain potentials (ERPs). In the case of phoric elements such as pronouns, a second strategy is known according to which an ambiguous pronoun preferentially receives the grammatical function that its antecedent has (parallel function strategy). In an ERP study, we show that this strategy can in principle override the general subject preference strategy (known for both pronominal and nonpronominal constituents) and induce an object preference, in case that the pronoun's antecedent is itself an object. Interestingly, the revision of a subject preference leads to a P600 component, whereas the revision of an object preference induces an earlier positivity (P345). In order to show that the latter component is indeed a positivity and not an N400-like negativity in the same time range, we apply an additional analysis based on symbolic dynamics which allows to determine the polarity of an ERP effect on purely methodological grounds. With respect to the two positivities, we argue that the latency differences reflect qualitative differences in the reanalysis processes
Many agrammatic aphasics have a specific syntactic comprehension deficit involving processing syntactic transformations. It has been proposed that this deficit is due to a dysfunction of Broca's area, an area that is thought to be critical for comprehension of complex transformed sentences. The goal of this study was to investigate the role of Broca's area in processing canonical and non-canonical sentences in healthy subjects. The sentences were presented auditorily and were controlled for task difficulty. Subjects were asked to judge the grammaticality of the sentences while their brain activity was monitored using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. Processing both kinds of sentences resulted in activation of language-related brain regions. Comparison of non-canonical and canonical sentences showed greater activation in bilateral temporal regions; a greater activation of Broca's area in processing antecedent-gap relations was not found. Moreover, the posterior part of Broca's area was conjointly activated by both sentence conditions. Broca's area is thus involved in general syntactic processing as required by grammaticality judgments and does not seem to have a specific role in processing syntactic transformations. (C) 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc
Minimalism, Features and Parallel Grammars : on the acquisition of German ditransitive structures
(2004)
Measuring language
(2004)
The study of language, its processing and its bearing on human cortical processes are all extensive domains of investigation in their own right. In this overview tutorial we limit ourselves to a sample of core illustrative issues. Our central aim is to demonstrate how complexity within the language faculty arises from two a priori distinct sources: the computational complexity inherent in the grammar of the language system itself and the procedural complexity resulting from marshalling processing resources in order to produce or interpret utterances that correspond to the grammar. Distinguishing between these two sources of complexity is a current goal in investigations of the human language faculty. The combination of quantitative approaches with newer qualitative approaches to the analysis of electro-cortical behaviour associated with carefully controlled language paradigms represents a new approach to clarifying this central issue
We describe a part of the stimulus sentences of a German language processing ERP experiment using a context- free grammar and represent different processing preferences by its unambiguous partitions. The processing is modeled by deterministic pushdown automata. Using a theorem proven by Moore, we map these automata onto discrete time dynamical systems acting at the unit square, where the processing preferences are represented by a control parameter. The actual states of the automata are rectangles lying in the unit square that can be interpreted as cylinder sets in the context of symbolic dynamics theory. We show that applying a wrong processing preference to a certain input string leads to an unwanted invariant set in the parsers dynamics. Then, syntactic reanalysis and repair can be modeled by a switching of the control parameter - in analogy to phase transitions observed in brain dynamics. We argue that ERP components are indicators of these bifurcations and propose an ERP-like measure of the parsing model
In most experiments using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), there is a straightforward way to define-on theoretical grounds-which of the conditions tested is the experimental condition and which is the control condition. It, however, theoretical assumptions do not give sufficient and unambiguous information to decide this question, then the interpretation of an ERP effect becomes difficult, especially if one takes into account that certain effects can be both a positivity or a negativity on the basis of the morphology of the pattern as well as with respect to peak latency (regard for example, N400 and P345). Exemplified with an ERP experiment on language processing, we present such a critical case and offer a possible solution on the basis of nonlinear data analysis. We show that a generalized polarity histogram, the word statistics of symbolic dynamics, is in principle able to distinguish negative going ERP components from positive ones when an appropriate encoding strategy, the half wave encoding is employed. We propose statistical criteria which allow to determine ERP components on purely methodological grounds
Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632. - Vol. 1
(2004)
Contents: A1: Phonology and syntax of focussing and topicalisation: Gisbert Fanselow: Cyclic Phonology–Syntax-Interaction: Movement to First Position in German Caroline Féry and Laura Herbst: German Sentence Accent Revisited Shinichiro Ishihara: Prosody by Phase: Evidence from Focus Intonation–Wh-scope Correspondence in Japanese A2: Quantification and information structure: Cornelia Endriss and Stefan Hinterwimmer: The Influence of Tense in Adverbial Quantification A3: Rhetorical Structure in Spoken Language: Modeling of Global Prosodic Parameters: Ekaterina Jasinskaja, Jörg Mayer and David Schlangen: Discourse Structure and Information Structure: Interfaces and Prosodic Realization B2: Focussing in African Tchadic languages: Katharina Hartmann and Malte Zimmermann: Focus Strategies in Chadic: The Case of Tangale Revisited D1: Linguistic database for information structure: Annotation and retrieval: Stefanie Dipper, Michael Götze, Manfred Stede and Tillmann Wegst: ANNIS: A Linguistic Database for Exploring Information Structure
German accent revisited
(2004)
How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words. Evidence from the head-turn preference paradigm shows that, although 12- to 13-month-olds cannot do this, 14- to 16- month-olds are able to use a determiner to categorize a following novel word as a noun. In contrast, no categorization effect was found for a novel word following a subject pronoun. To understand this difference we analyzed adult child- directed speech. This analysis showed that there are in fact stronger co-occurrence relations between determiners and nouns than between subject pronouns and verbs. Thus, in German determiners may be more reliable Cues to the syntactic category of an adjacent novel word than are subject pronouns. We propose that the capacity to syntactically categorize novel words, demonstrated here for the first time in children this young, mediates between the recognition of the specific morphosyntactic frame in which a novel word appears and the word-to-world mapping that is needed to build up a semantic representation for the novel word
Fakten, Fakten, Fakten!
(2004)
Europäische Slavistische Linguistik : Beiträge der Europäischen Slavistischen Linguistik (Polyslav)
(2004)
In einer multiplen Einzelfallstudie mit zehn aphasischen Patienten wurde die Wirksamkeit eines semantischen und eines phonologischen Therapieansatzes zur Behandlung von Wortabrufstörungen verglichen. Detaillierte Einzelfalluntersuchungen ermöglichten die Diagnose der zugrundeliegenden funktionalen Störungen bei jedem Patienten. Auf diese Weise konnten die erzielten Therapieeffekte auf die individuellen kognitiv-neurolinguistischen Störungsmuster bezogen werden. Im Vordergrund der Therapie stand in beiden Ansätzen das mündliche Benennen von Objektabbildungen mit unterschiedlichen Arten von Hilfen. Während in der semantischen Therapie Teilaspekte des semantischen Zielkonzepts als Benennhilfen eingesetzt wurden, handelte es sich bei den phonologischen Hilfen um Teilinformationen der Zielwortform. Bei der Erhebung von spezifischen Therapieeffekten wurde zwischen itemspezifischen und itemübergreifenden Verbesserungen sowie kurz- und langfristigen Effekten auf die mündlichen Benennleistungen unterschieden. Dabei wurden neben den quantitativen Verbesserungen (% korrekt) auch die qualitativen Effekte (Fehlertypen) der beiden Ansätze berücksichtigt, und es wurden Transfereffekte in die Spontansprache der Patienten untersucht. Zusätzlich wurden auch die Soforteffekte der verschiedenen Benennhilfen in den Therapiesitzungen erhoben. Im Methodenvergleich zeigte sich, dass die phonologische Therapiephase kurzfristig bei der Mehrzahl der Patienten signifikante Verbesserungen beim Bildbenennen bewirkte, diese Effekte haben sich jedoch überwiegend als nicht stabil erwiesen. Im Gegensatz dazu erwies sich die semantische Therapiephase auch als langfristig effektiv. Im Unterschied dazu erwiesen sich die phonologischen Benennhilfen bei fast allen Patienten als unmittelbar effektiver als die semantischen Benennhilfen. Somit waren die Soforteffekte der Hilfetypen in den Therapiesitzungen kein sicherer Indikator für die Dauer der Gesamteffekte einer Therapiephase. Außerdem zeigte sich nicht bei allen Patienten ein direkter Zusammenhang zwischen der Art ihrer zugrundeliegenden funktionalen Störung und den erzielten Therapieeffekten. Einerseits profitierten Patienten mit erhaltenen semantischen Verarbeitungsleistungen von der semantischen Therapie, andererseits zeigten sich signifikante phonologische Therapieeffekte bei Patienten mit zentral-semantischen Störungen. Die Wirkmechanismen der beiden Therapieansätze werden unter Berücksichtigung unterschiedlicher kognitiv-neurolinguistischer Theorien zum mündlichen Wortabrufprozess beim Bildbenennen interpretiert.
Adverb positioning is guided by syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic considerations and is subject to cross-linguistic as well as language-specific variation. The goal of the thesis is to identify the factors that determine adverb placement in general (Part I) as well as in constructions in which the adverb's sister constituent is deprived of its phonetic material by movement or ellipsis (gap constructions, Part II) and to provide an Optimality Theoretic approach to the contrasts in the effects of these factors on the distribution of adverbs in English, French, and German. In Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993), grammaticality is defined as optimal satisfaction of a hierarchy of violable constraints: for a given input, a set of output candidates are produced out of which that candidate is selected as grammatical output which optimally satisfies the constraint hierarchy. Since grammaticality crucially relies on the hierarchic relations of the constraints, cross-linguistic variation can be traced back to differences in the language-specific constraint rankings. Part I shows how diverse phenomena of adverb placement can be captured by corresponding constraints and their relative rankings: - contrasts in the linearization of adverbs and verbs/auxiliaries in English and French - verb placement in German and the filling of the prefield position - placement of focus-sensitive adverbs - fronting of topical arguments and adverbs Part II extends the analysis to a particular phenomenon of adverb positioning: the avoidance of adverb attachment to a phonetically empty constituent (gap). English and French are similar in that the acceptability of pre-gap adverb placement depends on the type of adverb, its scope, and the syntactic construction (English: wh-movement vs. topicalization / VP Fronting / VP Ellipsis, inverted vs. non-inverted clauses; French: CLLD vs. Cleft, simple vs. periphrastic tense). Yet, the two languages differ in which strategies a specific type of adverb may pursue to escape placement in front of a certain type of gap. In contrast to English and French, placement of an adverb in front of a gap never gives rise to ungrammaticality in German. Rather, word ordering has to obey the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic principles discussed in Part I; whether or not it results in adverb attachment to a phonetically empty constituent seems to be irrelevant: though constraints are active in every language, the emergence of a visible effect of their requirements in a given language depends on their relative ranking. The complex interaction of the diverse factors as well as their divergent effects on adverb placement in the various languages are accounted for by the universal constraints and their language-specific hierarchic relations in the OT framework.
This study describes ME, a patient in the chronic stage after a traumatic brain injury. During an extensive training programme ME tried to regain automaticity in the retrieval of simple multiplication facts. He succeeded in substantially decreasing response latencies in multiplication, reducing the handicap at his job. This improvement generalised to a non-trained operand order, to non-trained problems, and to a non-trained output modality. Moreover, these effects were maintained over at least four months. Interestingly, however, ME's training effects were operation specific: No significant improvement occurred in addition, subtraction, or division. As coloured presentation of multiplication problems proved to be a valuable cue in facilitating the patient's performance, this might turn out to be a useful tool in the rehabilitation of fact retrieval in general