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Cleft exhaustivity
(2020)
In this dissertation a series of experimental studies are presented which demonstrate that the exhaustive inference of focus-background it-clefts in English and their cross-linguistic counterparts in Akan, French, and German is neither robust nor systematic. The inter-speaker and cross-linguistic variability is accounted for with a discourse-pragmatic approach to cleft exhaustivity, in which -- following Pollard & Yasavul 2016 -- the exhaustive inference is derived from an interaction with another layer of meaning, namely, the existence presupposition encoded in clefts.
Previous research has shown that heritage speakers struggle with inflectional morphology. 'Limitations of online resources' for processing a non-dominant language has been claimed as one possible reason for these difficulties. To date, however, there is very little experimental evidence on real-time language processing in heritage speakers. Here we report results from a masked priming experiment with 97 bilingual (Turkish/German) heritage speakers and a control group of 40 non-heritage speakers of Turkish examining regular and irregular forms of the Turkish aorist. We found that, for the regular aorist, heritage speakers use the same morphological decomposition mechanism ('affix stripping') as control speakers, whereas for processing irregularly inflected forms they exhibited more variability (i.e., less homogeneous performance) than the control group. Heritage speakers also demonstrated semantic priming effects. At a more general level, these results indicate that heritage speakers draw on multiple sources of information for recognizing morphologically complex words.
Prosodic boundaries can be used to disambiguate the syntactic structure of coordinated name sequences (coordinates). To answer the question whether disambiguating prosody is produced in a situationally dependent or independent manner and to contribute to our understanding of the nature of the prosody-syntax link, we systematically explored variability in the prosody of boundary productions of coordinates evoked by different contextual settings in a referential communication task. Our analysis focused on prosodic boundaries produced to distinguish sequences with different syntactic structures (i.e., with or without internal grouping of the constituents). In German, these prosodic boundaries are indicated by three major prosodic cues: f0-range, final lengthening, and pause. In line with the Proximity/Anti-Proximity principle of the syntax-prosody model by Kentner and Fery (2013), speakers clearly use all three cues for constituent grouping and prosodically mark groups within and at their right boundary, indicating that prosodic phrasing is not a local phenomenon. Intra-individually, we found a rather stable prosodic pattern across contexts. However, inter-individually speakers differed from each other with respect to the prosodic cue combinations that they (consistently) used to mark the boundaries. Overall, our data speak in favour of a close link between syntax and prosody and for situational independence of disambiguating prosody.
The picture-word interference paradigm (participants name target pictures while ignoring distractor words) is often used to model the planning processes involved in word production. The participants' naming times are delayed in the presence of a distractor (general interference). The size of this effect depends on the relationship between the target and distractor words. Distractors of the same semantic category create more interference (semantic interference), and distractors overlapping in phonology create less interference (phonological facilitation). The present study examined the relationships between these experimental effects, processing times, and attention in order to better understand the cognitive processes underlying participants' behavior in this paradigm. Participants named pictures with a superimposed line of Xs, semantically related distractors, phonologically related distractors, or unrelated distractors. General interference, semantic interference, and phonological facilitation effects were replicated. Distributional analyses revealed that general and semantic interference effects increase with naming times, while phonological facilitation decreases. The phonological facilitation and semantic interference effects were found to depend on the synchronicity in processing times between the planning of the picture's name and the processing of the distractor word. Finally, electroencephalographic power in the alpha band before stimulus onset varied with the position of the trial in the experiment and with repetition but did not predict the size of interference/facilitation effects. Taken together, these results suggest that experimental effects in the picture-word interference paradigm depend on processing times to both the target word and distractor word and that distributional patterns could partly reflect this dependency.