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Brain potentials for derivational morphology an ERP study of deadjectival nominalizations in Spanish
(2012)
This study investigates brain potentials to derived word forms in Spanish. Two experiments were performed on derived nominals that differ in terms of their productivity and semantic properties but are otherwise similar, an acceptability judgment task and a reading experiment using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in which correctly and incorrectly formed derived words were presented in sentence contexts. The first experiment indicated productivity differences between the different nominalization processes in Spanish. The second experiment yielded a pattern of ERP responses that differed from both the familiar lexical-semantic and grammatical ERP effects. Violations of derivational morphology elicited an increased N400 component plus a late positivity (P600), unlike gender-agreement violations, which produced the biphasic LAN/P600 ERP pattern known from previous studies of morpho-syntactic violations. We conclude that the recognition of derived word forms engages both word-level (lexical-semantic) and decompositional (morpheme-based) processes.
Given the contemporary trend to modular NLP architectures and multiple annotation frameworks, the existence of concurrent tokenizations of the same text represents a pervasive problem in everyday's NLP practice and poses a non-trivial theoretical problem to the integration of linguistic annotations and their interpretability in general. This paper describes a solution for integrating different tokenizations using a standoff XML format, and discusses the consequences from a corpus-linguistic perspective.
Bilingual speakers are faced with the problem to keep their languages apart, but do so with interindividually varying success. Cognitive control abilities might be an important factor to explain such interindividual differences. Here we compare two late, balanced and highly proficient bilingual groups (mean age 24 years, L1 Russian, L2 German) which were established according to their language control abilities on a bilingual picture-naming task. One group had difficulties to remain in the instructed target language and switched unintentionally to the non-target language ("switchers"), whereas the other group rarely switched unintentionally ("non-switchers"). This group-specific behavior could not be explained by language background, socio-cultural, or demographic variables. Rather, the non-switchers also demonstrated a faster and better performance on four cognitive control tests (Tower of Hanoi, Ruff Figural Fluency Test, Divided Attention, Go/Nogo). Here, we focus on two additional executive function tasks, theWisconsin Card SortingTest (WCST) and the Flanker task requiring conflict monitoring and conflict resolution. Non-switchers outperformed switchers with regard to speed and accuracy, and were better at finding and applying the correct rules in the WCST. Similarly, in the Flanker task non-switchers performed faster and better on conflict trials and had a higher correction rate following an error. Event-related potential recordings furthermore revealed a smaller error-related negativity in the non-switchers, taken as evidence for a more efficient self-monitoring system. We conclude that bilingual language performance, in particular switching behavior, is related to performance on cognitive control tasks. Better cognitive control, including conflict monitoring, results in decreased unintentional switching.
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.
The present article introduces a theory of (morpho-)syntactic focus marking on nominal categories in Bura, a Central Chadic SVO language spoken in the northeast of Nigeria. Our central claim is that the particle an plays a crucial role in the marking of subject and non-subject focus. We put forward a uniform analysis of an as a focus copula that selects for syntactic predicates of type < e,t > and a focused constituent of type < e >. This uniform semantic representation is transparently mapped onto different syntactic structures: In a clause with a focused subject, the focus copula appears between the subject in SpecTP and the predicative VP. On the other hand, syntactically focused non-subjects are fronted and appear in a bi-clausal cleft structure that contains the focus copula and a relative cleft-remnant. The non-uniform analysis of focus marking is further supported by the structure of predicative constructions, in which the focus copula separates the focused subject and the adjectival or nominal predicate. It is also shown that alternative unified analyses fail to account for the full range of Bura data. The latter part of the article provides an analysis of the Bura cleft construction. Based on syntactic and semantic evidence, we come to the conclusion that the clefted constituent is base-generated in its initial surface position, and that an empty operator moves within the relative clause. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the potential conceptual reasons behind the observed subject/non-subject asymmetry in Bura.
The present study introduces the first substantial German database with norms for semantic typicality, age of acquisition, and concept familiarity for 824 exemplars of 11 semantic categories, including four natural ( and ) and five man-made (, and ) categories, as well as and Each category exemplar in the database was collected empirically in an exemplar generation study. For each category exemplar, norms for semantic typicality, estimated age of acquisition, and concept familiarity were gathered in three different rating studies. Reliability data and additional analyses on effects of semantic category and intercorrelations between age of acquisition, semantic typicality, concept familiarity, word length, and word frequency are provided. Overall, the data show high inter- and intrastudy reliabilities, providing a new resource tool for designing experiments with German word materials. The full database is available in the supplementary material of this file and also at www.psychonomic.org/archive.
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.
Older adults often experience hearing difficulties in multitalker situations. Attentional control of auditory perception is crucial in situations where a plethora of auditory inputs compete for further processing. We combined an intensity-modulated dichotic listening paradigm with attentional manipulations to study adult age differences in the interplay between perceptual saliency and attentional control of auditory processing. When confronted with two competing sources of verbal auditory input, older adults modulated their attention less flexibly and were more driven by perceptual saliency than younger adults. These findings suggest that aging severely impairs the attentional regulation of auditory perception.
Annotating linguistic data has become a major field of interest, both for supplying the necessary data for machine learning approaches to NLP applications, and as a research issue in its own right. This comprises issues of technical formats, tools, and methodologies of annotation. We provide a brief overview of these notions and then introduce the papers assembled in this special issue.