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Проведен анализ пространственной семантики различных категорий русских существительных, входящих в психолингви-стическую базуданных; особое внимание уделяется абстрактным концептам. Выявлены различия пространственной семантики наименований физических ощущений и действий, эмоций, ментальных процессов. Полученны ерезультаты обсуждаются с точки зрения отдельных подходов в рамках теории воплощенного познания – теории концептуальной метафоры, теории слов как социальных инструментов (WAT, Words As social Tools), нейросемантики.
The article presents first results of a pilot study on the syntactic changes in Polish as a language contact in Germany. On the base of the experimental data tests the study examines the syntactic changes in Polish of two diaspora-generations: the so called forgetters and the incomplete learners. The article focuses on the questions: how the situation of languages in contact influences the syntactic changes in the heritage language (Polish) and which status have those syntactic transferences. Other linguistic and sociolinguistic factors, capable to cause the language change in the situation of language contact, are also discussed in the article.
Electrophysiological research using verbal response paradigms faces the problem of muscle artifacts that occur during speech production or in the period preceding articulation. In this context, this paper has two related aims. The first is to show how the nature of the first phoneme influences the alignment of the ERPs. The second is to further characterize the EEG signal around the onset of articulation, both in temporal and frequency domains. Participants were asked to name aloud pictures of common objects. We applied microstate analyses and time-frequency transformations of ERPs locked to vocal onset to compare the EEG signal between voiced and unvoiced labial plosive word onset consonants. We found a delay of about 40 ms in the set of stable topographic patterns for /b/ relative to /p/ onset words. A similar shift was observed in the power increase of gamma oscillations (30-50 Hz), which had an earlier onset for /p/ trials (similar to 150 ms before vocal onset). This 40-ms shift is consistent with the length of the voiced proportion of the acoustic signal prior to the release of the closure in the vocal responses. These results demonstrate that phonetic features are an important parameter affecting response-locked ERPs, and hence that the onset of the acoustic energy may not be an optimal trigger for synchronizing the EEG activity to the response in vocal paradigms. The indexes explored in this study provide a step forward in the characterization of muscle-related artifacts in electrophysiological studies of speech and language production.
The phenomenon of forced fixations suggests that readers sometimes fixate a word (due to oculomotor constraints) even though they intended to skip it (due to parafoveal cognitive-linguistic processing). We investigate whether this leads readers to look directly at a word but not pay attention to it. We used a gaze-contingent boundary paradigm to dissociate parafoveal and foveal information (e.g., the word phone changed to scarf once the reader's eyes moved to it) and asked questions about the sentence to determine which one the reader encoded. When the word was skipped or fixated only briefly (i.e., up to 100 ms) readers were more likely to report reading the parafoveal than the fixated word, suggesting that there are cases in which readers look directly at a word but their minds ignore it, leading to the illusion of reading something they did not fixate.
In present-day German we find new word order options, particularly well-known from Turkish-German bilingual speakers in the contexts of new urban dialects, which allow violations of the canonical verb-second position in independent declarative clauses. In these cases, two positions are occupied in the forefield in front of the finite verb, usually by an adverbial and a subject, which identify, at the level of information structure, frame-setter and topic, respectively. Our study investigates the influence of verbal versus language -independent information-structural preferences for this linearisation, comparing Turkish-German multilingual speakers who have grown up in Germany with monolingual German and Turkish speakers. For tasks, in which grammatical restrictions were largely minimised, the results indicate a general tendency to place verbs in a position after the frame-setter and the topic; in addition, we found language-specific influences that distinguish Turkish-German and monolingual German speakers from monolingual Turkish ones. We interpret this as evidence for an information-structural motivation for verb-third, and for a clear dominance of German for Turkish-German speakers in Germany.
Tone and intonation in Akan
(2017)
This chapter provides an account of the intonation patterns in Akan (Kwa, Niger-Congo). Tonal processes such as downstep, tonal spreading and tonal replacement influence the surface tone pattern of a sentence. In general, any Akan utterance independent of sentence type shows a characteristic down-trend in pitch. This chapter proposes that Akan employs a simple post-lexical tonal grammar that accounts for the shapes of an intonation contour. The unmarked post-lexical structure is found in simple declaratives. The downward trend of an intonation contour is shaped by local tonal interactions (downstep), and sentence-final tonal neutralization. In polar questions, an iota-phrase-final low boundary tone (L%) accounts for the intensity increase and lengthening of the final vowel compared to a declarative. Complex declaratives and left-dislocations show a partial pitch reset at the left edge of an embedded iota-phrase. Underlying lexical tones are not affected by intonation with the exception of sentence-final H-tones.
Rezensiertes Werk
Theresa Biberauer u. George Walkden (Hgg.): Syntax over Time: Lexical, Morphological, and Information – Structural Interactions - Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, 418 S.
How do late proficient bilinguals process morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic information in their non-native language (L2)? How is this information represented in the L2 mental lexicon? And what are the neural signatures of L2 morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic processing? We addressed these questions in one behavioral and two ERP priming experiments on inflected German adjectives testing a group of advanced late Russian learners of German in comparison to native speaker (L1) controls. While in the behavioral experiment, the L2 learners performed native-like, the ERP data revealed clear L1/L2 differences with respect to the temporal dynamics of grammatical processing. Specifically, our results show that L2 morphosyntactic processing yielded temporally and spatially extended brain responses relative to L1 processing, indicating that grammatical processing of inflected words in an L2 is more demanding and less automatic than in the L1. However, this group of advanced L2 learners showed native-like lexical-semantic processing.
In two cross-linguistic priming experiments with native German speakers of L2 English, we investigated the role of constituent order and level of embedding in cross-linguistic structural priming. In both experiments, significant priming effects emerged only if prime and target were similar with regard to constituent order and also situated on the same level of embedding. We discuss our results on the basis of two current theoretical accounts of cross-linguistic priming, and conclude that neither an account based on combinatorial nodes nor an account assuming that constituent order is directly responsible for the priming effect can fully explain our data pattern. We suggest an account that explains cross-linguistic priming through a hierarchical tree representation. This representation is computed during processing of the prime, and can influence the formulation of a target sentence only when the structural features specified in it are grammatically correct in the target sentence.
The predictions of two contrasting approaches to the acquisition of transitive relative clauses were tested within the same groups of German-speaking participants aged from 3 to 5 years old. The input frequency approach predicts that object relative clauses with inanimate heads (e.g., the pullover that the man is scratching) are comprehended earlier and more accurately than those with an animate head (e.g., the man that the boy is scratching). In contrast, the structural intervention approach predicts that object relative clauses with two full NP arguments mismatching in number (e.g., the man that the boys are scratching) are comprehended earlier and more accurately than those with number-matching NPs (e.g., the man that the boy is scratching). These approaches were tested in two steps. First, we ran a corpus analysis to ensure that object relative clauses with number-mismatching NPs are not more frequent than object relative clauses with number-matching NPs in child directed speech. Next, the comprehension of these structures was tested experimentally in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds respectively by means of a color naming task. By comparing the predictions of the two approaches within the same participant groups, we were able to uncover that the effects predicted by the input frequency and by the structural intervention approaches co-exist and that they both influence the performance of children on transitive relative clauses, but in a manner that is modulated by age. These results reveal a sensitivity to animacy mismatch already being demonstrated by 3-year-olds and show that animacy is initially deployed more reliably than number to interpret relative clauses correctly. In all age groups, the animacy mismatch appears to explain the performance of children, thus, showing that the comprehension of frequent object relative clauses is enhanced compared to the other conditions. Starting with 4-year-olds but especially in 5-year-olds, the number mismatch supported comprehension-a facilitation that is unlikely to be driven by input frequency. Once children fine-tune their sensitivity to verb agreement information around the age of four, they are also able to deploy number marking to overcome the intervention effects. This study highlights the importance of testing experimentally contrasting theoretical approaches in order to characterize the multifaceted, developmental nature of language acquisition.
Aims and objectives: Our study addresses the following research questions: To what extent is L2 comprehenders’ online sensitivity to morphosyntactic disambiguation cues affected by L1 background? Does noticing the error signal trigger successful reanalysis in both L1 and L2 comprehension? Can previous findings suggesting that case is a better reanalysis cue than agreement be replicated and extended to L2 processing when using closely matched materials? Design/methodology/approach: We carried out a self-paced reading study using temporarily ambiguous object-initial sentences in German. These were disambiguated either by number marking on the verb or by nominative case marking on the subject. End-of-trial comprehension questions probed whether or not our participants ultimately succeeded in computing the correct interpretation. Data and analysis: We tested a total of 121 participants (25 Italian, 32 Russian, 32 Korean and 32 native German speakers), measuring their word-by-word reading times and comprehension accuracy. The data were analysed using linear mixed-effects and logistic regression modelling. Findings/conclusions: All three learner groups showed online sensitivity to both case and agreement disambiguation cues. Noticing case disambiguations did not necessarily lead to a correct interpretation, whereas noticing agreement disambiguations did. We conclude that intermediate to advanced learners are sensitive to morphosyntactic interpretation cues during online processing regardless of whether or not corresponding grammatical distinctions exist in their L1. Our results also suggest that case is not generally a better reanalysis cue than agreement. Significance/implications: L1 influence on L2 processing is more limited than might be expected. Contra previous findings, even intermediate learners show sensitivity to both agreement and case information during processing.
Since the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) was first put forward in 2006, it has inspired a growing body of research on grammatical processing in nonnative (L2) speakers. More than 10 years later, we think it is time for the SSH to be reconsidered in the light of new empirical findings and current theoretical assumptions about human language processing. The purpose of our critical commentary is twofold: to clarify some issues regarding the SSH and to sketch possible ways in which this hypothesis might be refined and improved to better account for L1 and L2 speakers’ performance patterns.
We report a comprehensive review of the published reading studies on retrieval interference in reflexive-/reciprocal-antecedent and subject-verb dependencies. We also provide a quantitative random-effects meta-analysis of eyetracking and self-paced reading studies. We show that the empirical evidence is only partly consistent with cue-based retrieval as implemented in the ACT-R-based model of sentence processing by Lewis and Vasishth (2005) (LV05) and that there are important differences between the reviewed dependency types. In non-agreement subject-verb dependencies, there is evidence for inhibitory interference in configurations where the correct dependent fully matches the retrieval cues. This is consistent with the LV05 cue-based retrieval account. By contrast, in subject-verb agreement as well as in reflexive-/reciprocal-antecedent dependencies, no evidence for inhibitory interference is found in configurations with a fully cue-matching subject/antecedent. In configurations with only a partially cue-matching subject or antecedent, the meta-analysis reveals facilitatory interference in subject-verb agreement and inhibitory interference in reflexives/reciprocals. The former is consistent with the LV05 account, but the latter is not. Moreover, the meta-analysis reveals that (i) interference type (proactive versus retroactive) leads to different effects in the reviewed dependency types and (ii) the prominence of the distractor strongly influences the interference effect. In sum, the meta-analysis suggests that the LV05 needs important modifications to account for the unexplained interference patterns and the differences between the dependency types. More generally, the meta-analysis provides a quantitative empirical basis for comparing the predictions of competing accounts of retrieval processes in sentence comprehension. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.