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Institute
- Department Linguistik (68) (remove)
German-learning infants' ability to detect unstressed closed-class elements in continuous speech
(2003)
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
The recognition of the prosodic focus position in German-Learning Infants from 4 to 14 Months
(2006)
Phonological specificity of early lexical representations in German 19-month-olds at risk for SLI
(2006)
Crosslinguistic perspectives on segmentation and categorization in early language acquisition
(2009)
On the distribution of dorsals in complex and simple onsets in child German, Dutch and English
(2009)
Two recent studies (Johnson et al., 2005; Perez-Leroux, 2006) found that English- and Spanish-learning children do not show the ability to use verb inflection as a cue to subject number before the age of 5 to 6 years. These findings suggest an asymmetric development as verb inflections are usually correctly produced before this age. In the present study we investigated whether German 3- to 4-year-olds take advantage of the information provided by the verb inflection in sentence comprehension. In a first study, children's looking behavior at two pictures was measured after presentation of a sentence in which the subject number was coded only by the verb inflection. The results from this study suggest that children's looks reflect correct interpretation of the sentences and thus show their ability to make use of verb inflection. In a second experiment, preferential looking was combined with an additional task in which the children had to point to the matching picture. in this case children did not perform above chance level. Our results underline the relevance that specific task demands have on the performance of children in comprehension testing. These have to be accounted for when interpreting findings on production and comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition.
Prosody plays an important role in early language acquisition that in most children proceeds rapidly and easily. From birth on infants are able to perceive prosodic information in the speech signal. During the course of the first year of life prosodic perception abilities continue to develop. Cross-linguistic studies have shown that this development is already influenced by the native language. As prosodic and syntactic units occur often in correlation, prosodic cues in the continuous speech signal might help infants to derive information on how to segment their native language into syntactically relevant units. Indeed, infants use their prosodic perception and are able to detect word, phrase and clause boundaries using prosodic cues from the speech signal. Thus, during the first year of life when perceiving speech the processing of prosodic cues is focussed and allows for an efficient access to language acquisition. Future studies need to determine whether early prosodic perception abilities can provide markers for later language development and predict language impairment.
Restrictions on addition
(2012)
Children up to school age have been reported to perform poorly when interpreting sentences containing restrictive and additive focus particles by treating sentences with a focus particle in the same way as sentences without it. Careful comparisons between results of previous studies indicate that this phenomenon is less pronounced for restrictive than for additive particles. We argue that this asymmetry is an effect of the presuppositional status of the proposition triggered by the additive particle. We tested this in two experiments with German-learning three-and four-year-olds using a method that made the exploitation of the information provided by the particles highly relevant for completing the task. Three-year-olds already performed remarkably well with sentences both with auch 'also' and with nur 'only'. Thus, children can consider the presuppositional contribution of the additive particle in their sentence interpretation and can exploit the restrictive particle as a marker of exhaustivity.
Monolingual infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language around 6 to 9 months of age, a fact marked by the development of preferences for predominant prosodic patterns and a decrease in sensitivity to non-native prosodic properties. The present study evaluates the effects of bilingual acquisition on speech perception by exploring how stress pattern perception may differ in French-learning 10-month-olds raised in bilingual as opposed to monolingual environments. Experiment 1 shows that monolinguals can discriminate stress patterns following a long familiarization to one of two patterns, but not after a short familiarization. In Experiment 2, two subgroups of bilingual infants growing up learning both French and another language (varying across infants) in which stress is used lexically were tested under the more difficult short familiarization condition: one with balanced input, and one receiving more input in the language other than French. Discrimination was clearly found for the other-language-dominant subgroup, establishing heightened sensitivity to stress pattern contrasts in these bilinguals as compared to monolinguals. However, the balanced bilinguals' performance was not better than that of monolinguals, establishing an effect of the relative balance of the language input. This pattern of results is compatible with the proposal that sensitivity to prosodic contrasts is maintained or enhanced in a bilingual population compared to a monolingual population in which these contrasts are non-native, provided that this dimension is used in one of the two languages in acquisition, and that infants receive enough input from that language.
Previous studies have revealed that infants aged 6-10 months are able to use the acoustic correlates of major prosodic boundaries, that is, pitch change, preboundary lengthening, and pause, for the segmentation of the continuous speech signal. Moreover, investigations with American-English- and Dutch-learning infants suggest that processing prosodic boundary markings involves a weighting of these cues. This weighting seems to develop with increasing exposure to the native language and to underlie crosslinguistic variation. In the following, we report the results of four experiments using the headturn preference procedure to explore the perception of prosodic boundary cues in German infants. We presented 8-month-old infants with a sequence of names in two different prosodic groupings, with or without boundary markers. Infants discriminated both sequences when the boundary was marked by all three cues (Experiment 1) and when it was marked by a pitch change and preboundary lengthening in combination (Experiment 2). The presence of a pitch change (Experiment 3) or preboundary lengthening (Experiment 4) as single cues did not lead to a successful discrimination. Our results indicate that pause is not a necessary cue for German infants. Pitch change and preboundary lengthening in combination, but not as single cues, are sufficient. Hence, by 8 months infants only rely on a convergence of boundary markers. Comparisons with adults' performance on the same stimulus materials suggest that the pattern observed with the 8-month-olds is already consistent with that of adults. We discuss our findings with respect to crosslinguistic variation and the development of a language-specific prosodic cue weighting.
Perceptual attunement to one's native language results in language-specific processing of speech sounds. This includes stress cues, instantiated by differences in intensity, pitch, and duration. The present study investigates the effects of linguistic experience on the perception of these cues by studying the Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL), which states that listeners group sounds trochaically (strong-weak) if the sounds vary in loudness or pitch and iambically (weak-strong) if they vary in duration. Participants were native listeners either of French or German; this comparison was chosen because French adults have been shown to be less sensitive than speakers of German and other languages to word-level stress, which is communicated by variation in cues such as intensity, fundamental frequency (F0), or duration. In experiment 1, participants listened to sequences of co-articulated syllables varying in either intensity or duration. The German participants were more consistent in their grouping than the French for both cues. Experiment 2 was identical to experiment 1 except that intensity variation was replaced by pitch variation. German participants again showed more consistency for both cues, and French participants showed especially inconsistent grouping for the pitch-varied sequences. These experiments show that the perception of linguistic rhythm is strongly influenced by linguistic experience.
Two experiments tested how faithfully German children aged 4; 5 to 5; 6 reproduce ditransitive sentences that are unmarked or marked with respect to word order and focus (Exp1) or definiteness (Exp2). Adopting an optimality theory (OT) approach, it is assumed that in the German adult grammar word order is ranked lower than focus and definiteness. Faithfulness of children's reproductions decreased as markedness of inputs increased; unmarked structures were reproduced most faithfully and unfaithful outputs had most often an unmarked form. Consistent with the OT proposal, children were more tolerant against inputs marked for word order than for focus; in conflict with the proposal, children were less tolerant against inputs marked for word order than for definiteness. Our results suggest that the linearization of objects in German double object constructions is affected by focus and definiteness, but that prosodic principles may have an impact on the position of a focused constituent.
This study examines the processing of sentences with and without subject verb agreement violations in German-speaking children at three and five years of age. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to measure whether children's looking behavior was influenced by the grammaticality of the test sentences. The older group of children turned their gaze faster towards a target picture and looked longer at it when the object noun referring to the target was presented in a grammatical sentence with subject verb agreement compared to when the object noun was presented in a sentence in which an agreement violation occurred. The younger group of children displayed less conclusive results, with a tendency to look longer but not faster towards the target picture in the grammatical compared to the ungrammatical condition. This is the first experimental evidence that German-speaking five-year old children are sensitive to subject verb agreement and violations thereof. Our results additionally substantiate that the eye-tracking paradigm is suitable to examine children's sensitivity to subtle grammatical violations.
Language and music share many rhythmic properties, such as variations in intensity and duration leading to repeating patterns. Perception of rhythmic properties may rely on cognitive networks that are shared between the two domains. If so, then variability in speech rhythm perception may relate to individual differences in musicality. To examine this possibility, the present study focuses on rhythmic grouping, which is assumed to be guided by a domain-general principle, the Iambic/Trochaic law, stating that sounds alternating in intensity are grouped as strong-weak, and sounds alternating in duration are grouped as weak-strong. German listeners completed a grouping task: They heard streams of syllables alternating in intensity, duration, or neither, and had to indicate whether they perceived a strong-weak or weak-strong pattern. Moreover, their music perception abilities were measured, and they filled out a questionnaire reporting their productive musical experience. Results showed that better musical rhythm perception - ability was associated with more consistent rhythmic grouping of speech, while melody perception - ability and productive musical experience were not. This suggests shared cognitive procedures in the perception of rhythm in music and speech. Also, the results highlight the relevance of - considering individual differences in musicality when aiming to explain variability in prosody perception.
Previous research on young children's knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which revealed that three- to six-year-old children show adult-like comprehension of the prosodic marking of subject and object focus. Our findings thus support the view that production does not precede comprehension in the acquisition of focus. We tested participants speaking English, German, and French. All three languages allow prosodic subject and object focus marking, but use additional syntactic marking to varying degrees (English: dispreferred; German: possible; French preferred). French participants produced fewer subject marked responses than English participants. We found no other cross-linguistic differences. Participants interpreted prosodic focus marking similarly and in an adult-like fashion in all three languages.
Our paper reports an act out task with German 5- and 6-year olds and adults involving doubly-quantified sentences with a universal object and an existential subject. We found that 5- and 6-year olds allow inverse scope in such sentences, while adults do not. Our findings contribute to a growing body of research (e.g. Gualmini et al. 2008; Musolino 2009, etc.) showing that children are more flexible in their scopal considerations than initially proposed by the Isomorphism proposal (Lidz & Musolino 2002; Musolino & Lidz 2006). This result provides support for a theory of German, a “no quantifier raising”-language, in terms of soft violable constraints, or global economy terms (Bobaljik & Wurmbrand 2012), rather than in terms of hard inviolable constraints or rules (Frey 1993). Finally, the results are compatible with Reinhart’s (2004) hypothesis that children do not perform global interface economy considerations due to the increased processing associated with it.
This study investigates prosodic phrasing of bracketed lists in German. We analyze variation in pauses, phrase-final lengthening and f0 in speech production and how these cues affect boundary perception. In line with the literature, it was found that pauses are often used to signal intonation phrase boundaries, while final lengthening and f0 are employed across different levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Deviations from expectations based on the standard syntax-prosody mapping are interpreted in terms of task-specific effects. That is, we argue that speakers add/delete prosodic boundaries to enhance the phonological contrast between different bracketings in the experimental task. In perception, three experiments were run, in which we tested only single cues (but temporally distributed at different locations of the sentences). Results from identification tasks and reaction time measurements indicate that pauses lead to a more abrupt shift in listeners׳ prosodic judgments, while f0 and final lengthening are exploited in a more gradient manner. Hence, pauses, final lengthening and f0 have an impact on boundary perception, though listeners show different sensitivity to the three acoustic cues.