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The aim of the doctoral project was to answer the question of whether the structural word-initial noun capitalization, as it can otherwise only be found in Luxembourgish alongside German, has a function that is advantageous for the reader. The overriding hypothesis was that an advantage is achieved by activating a syntactic category, namely the core of a noun phrase, through the parafoveal perception of the capital letters. This perception from the corner of the eye should make it possible to preprocess the following noun. As a result, sentence processing should be facilitated, which should ultimately be reflected in overall faster reading times and fixation durations.
The structure of the project includes three studies, some of which included different participant groups:
Study 1:
Study design: Semantic priming using garden-path sentences should bring out the functionality of noun capitalization for the reader
Participant groups: German natives reading German
Study 2:
Study design: same design as study 1, but in English
Participant groups:
English natives without any knowledge of German reading English
English natives who regularly read German reading English
German with high proficiency in English reading English
Study 3:
Study design:
Influence of the noun frequency on a potential preprocessing using the boundary paradigm; Study languages: German and English
Participant groups:
German natives reading German
English natives without any knowledge of German reading English
German with high proficiency in English reading English
Brief summary: The noun capitalization clearly has an impact on sentence processing in both German and English. It cannot be confirmed that this has a substantial, decisive advantage.
In this study, we investigated effects of morphological processing on handwriting production in beginning writers of German. Children from Grades 3 and 4 were asked to copy words from a computer screen onto a pen tablet, while we recorded their handwriting with high spatiotemporal resolution. Words involved a syllable-congruent visual disruption (e.g., "Golfer"), a morpheme-congruent visual disruption (e.g., "Golfer"), or had no disruption (e.g., "Golfer"). We analyzed productions in terms of Writing Onset Duration and Letter Duration at the onset of the second syllable ("f" in "Gol.fer") and the onset of the suffix ("e" in "Golf_er"). Results showed that durations were longer at word-writing onset only for words with a morpheme-congruent visual disruption. Also, letter durations were longer at the onset of the second syllable (i.e., "-fer") and shorter at the onset of the suffix (i.e., "-er") only for words with a syllable-congruent visual disruption. We interpret these findings within extant theories of handwriting production and offer an explanation for the observed effects before and during trajectory formation.
In this study, we investigated effects of morphological processing on handwriting production in beginning writers of German. Children from Grades 3 and 4 were asked to copy words from a computer screen onto a pen tablet, while we recorded their handwriting with high spatiotemporal resolution. Words involved a syllable-congruent visual disruption (e.g., "Golfer"), a morpheme-congruent visual disruption (e.g., "Golfer"), or had no disruption (e.g., "Golfer"). We analyzed productions in terms of Writing Onset Duration and Letter Duration at the onset of the second syllable ("f" in "Gol.fer") and the onset of the suffix ("e" in "Golf_er"). Results showed that durations were longer at word-writing onset only for words with a morpheme-congruent visual disruption. Also, letter durations were longer at the onset of the second syllable (i.e., "-fer") and shorter at the onset of the suffix (i.e., "-er") only for words with a syllable-congruent visual disruption. We interpret these findings within extant theories of handwriting production and offer an explanation for the observed effects before and during trajectory formation.
Learning handwriting
(2021)
Skilled handwriting of single letters is associated not only with a neat final product but also with fluent pen-movement, characterized by a smooth pen-tip velocity profile. Our study explored fluency when writing single letters in children who were just beginning to learn to handwrite, and the extent to which this was predicted by the children's pen-control ability and by their letter knowledge. 176 Norwegian children formed letters by copying and from dictation (i.e., in response to hearing letter sounds). Performance on these tasks was assessed in terms of the counts of velocity inversions as the children produced sub-letter features that would be produced by competent handwriters as a single, smooth (ballistic) action. We found that there was considerable variation in these measures across writers, even when producing well-formed letters. Children also copied unfamiliar symbols, completed various pen-control tasks (drawing lines, circles, garlands, and figure eights), and tasks that assessed knowledge of letter sounds and shapes. After controlling for pen-control ability, pen-movement fluency was affected by letter knowledge (specifically children's performance on a task that required selecting graphemes on the basis of their sound). This was the case when children retrieved letter forms from dictated letter sounds, but also when directly copying letters and, unexpectedly, when copying unfamiliar symbols. These findings suggest that familiarity with a letter affects movement fluency during letter production but may also point towards a more general ability to process new letter-like symbols in children with good letter knowledge.
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.