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Gender-inclusive language has evolved into a much-debated topic during the past years, discussed interdisciplinarily from theoretical to psycholinguistics, sociology, and economy – and by anyone who uses language.
Studies on German that primarily relied on questionnaires (reviewed in Braun et al. 2005), cloze tests (Klein 1988), and categorisation tasks with picture matching (Irmen & Köhncke 1996) disqualify the generically used masculine forms as pseudo-generic – failing their grammatically prescribed function to include referents of any Gender. Gender-balanced expressions (pair and split forms like Lehrer und Lehrerinnen) make explicit reference to female presence and participation, and thus elevate a more equitable interpretation.
Online methods to investigate the processing of Gender-sensitive language are surprisingly rare among research on the phenomenon, except for reaction time measures (Irmen & Köhncke 1996, Irmen & Kaczmarek 2000) and eye-tracking in reading (Irmen & Schumann 2011).
In addition, Gender-neutral language (GNL) has not been focused on in the majority of experiments, and when it was among the stimuli, results were inconclusive (De Backer & De Cuypere 2012) or found such alternatives to be ineffective (resembling masculine generics, Braun et al. 2005), despite the fact that guidelines on non-discriminatory language use commonly recommend these.
Gender-neutral (GN) expressions for personal reference in German include
• nominalised participles; nominalisations in general: Interessierte, Lehrende
• collective singulars: Publikum, Kollegium
• compounds (e.g., with a notion of “-person”): Ansprechpersonen, Lehrkräfte
• paraphrases that background a (gendered) subject: e.g., passives, relatives
In a visual world eye-tracking study, the comprehension of plural generics using masculine nouns and GN forms was tested for roles and occupations.
In complex stimulus scenarios, reference had to be established to referent images presented on a screen. At the end of each item, a question was asked in order to (re)identify the image that matched the referents of the respective setting best. Images depicted 1) a single person (protagonist), 2) an all-female group, 3) an all-male group, 4) a mixed Gender group of female and male members. The group referents were introduced with either a) masculine nouns (die Lehrer), b) female-specific feminine nouns (die Lehrerinnen), or c) one of the upper three nominal GN variants (die Lehrkräfte).
Results confirm the frequent male bias in masculine forms that are used as generics, that is, their male-specific interpretation. Furthermore, stereotypicality of nouns had an impact on responses. The GN alternatives, which are generally known to aim for indefinite reference (“marked” for Gender-fair language) were found to be most qualified to elicit mixed Gender group interpretations. When reference was established with GN terms, an inclusive response was consistently elicited. This was both indicated by eye movements and response proportions, but to a different extent depending on the particular GN noun type. Concepts that abstract from Gender in their linguistic forms (“neutralising” it) appear to be more inclusive, and thus better candidates for generic reference than masculines.
In recent years, a substantial number of psycholinguistic studies and of studies on acquired language impairments have investigated the case of morphologically complex words. These have provided evidence for what is known as ‘morphological decomposition’, i.e. a mechanism that decomposes complex words into their constituent morphemes during online processing. This is believed to be a fundamental, possibly universal mechanism of morphological processing, operating irrespective of a word’s specific properties.
However, current accounts of morphological decomposition are mostly based on evidence from suffixed words and compound words, while prefixed words have been comparably neglected. At the same time, it has been consistently observed that, across languages, prefixed words are less widespread than suffixed words. This cross-linguistic preference for suffixing morphology has been claimed to be grounded in language processing and language learning mechanisms. This would predict differences in how prefixed words are processed and therefore also affected in language impairments, challenging the predictions of the major accounts of morphological decomposition.
Against this background, the present thesis aims at reducing the gap between the accounts of morphological decomposition and the accounts of the suffixing preference, by providing a thorough empirical investigation of prefixed words. Prefixed words are examined in three different domains: (i) visual word processing in native speakers; (ii) visual word processing in non-native speakers; (iii) acquired morphological impairments. The processing studies employ the masked priming paradigm, tapping into early stages of visual word recognition. Instead, the studies on morphological impairments investigate the errors produced in reading aloud tasks.
As for native processing, the present work first focuses on derivation (Publication I), specifically investigating whether German prefixed derived words, both lexically restricted (e.g. inaktiv ‘inactive’) and unrestricted (e.g. unsauber ‘unclean’) can be efficiently decomposed. I then present a second study (Publication II) on a Bantu language, Setswana, which offers the unique opportunity of testing inflectional prefixes, and directly comparing priming with prefixed inflected primes (e.g. dikgeleke ‘experts’) to priming with prefixed derived primes (e.g. bokgeleke ‘talent’). With regard to non-native processing (Publication I), the priming effects obtained from the lexically restricted and unrestricted prefixed derivations in native speakers are additionally compared to the priming effects obtained in a group of non-native speakers of German. Finally, in the two studies on acquired morphological impairments, the thesis investigates whether prefixed derived words yield different error patterns than suffixed derived words (Publication III and IV).
For native speakers, the results show evidence for morphological decomposition of both types of prefixed words, i.e. lexically unrestricted and restricted derivations, as well as of prefixed inflected words. Furthermore, non-native speakers are also found to efficiently decompose prefixed derived words, with parallel results to the group of native speakers. I therefore conclude that, for the early stages of visual word recognition, the relative position of stem and affix in prefixed versus suffixed words does not affect how efficiently complex words are decomposed, either in native or in non-native processing. In the studies on acquired language impairments, instead, prefixes are consistently found to be more impaired than suffixes. This is explained in terms of a learnability disadvantage for prefixed words, which may cause weaker representations of the information encoded in affixes when these precede the stem (prefixes) as compared to when they follow it (suffixes). Based on the impairment profiles of the individual participants and on the nature of the task, this dissociation is assumed to emerge from later processing stages than those that are tapped into by masked priming. I therefore conclude that the different characteristics of prefixed and suffixed words do come into play at later processing stages, during which the lexical-semantic information contained in the different constituent morphemes is processed.
The findings presented in the four manuscripts significantly contribute to our current understanding of the mechanisms involved in processing prefixed words. Crucially, the thesis constrains the processing disadvantage for prefixed words to later processing stages, thereby suggesting that theories trying to establish links between language universals and processing mechanisms should more carefully consider the different stages involved in language processing and what factors are relevant for each specific stage.
The current study investigates how bilingual children encode and produce morphologically complex words. We employed a silent-production-plus-delayed-vocalization paradigm in which event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during silent encoding of inflected words which were subsequently cued to be overtly produced. The bilingual children's spoken responses and their ERPs were compared to previous datasets from monolingual children on the same task. We found an enhanced negativity for regular relative to irregular forms during silent production in both bilingual children's languages, replicating the ERP effect previously obtained from monolingual children. Nevertheless, the bilingual children produced more morphological errors (viz. over-regularizations) than monolingual children. We conclude that mechanisms of morphological encoding (as measured by ERPs) are parallel for bilingual and monolingual children, and that the increased over-regularization rates are due to their reduced exposure to each of the two languages (relative to monolingual children).
This paper presents a combination of R packages-user contributed toolkits written in a common core programming language-to facilitate the humanistic investigation of digitised, text-based corpora.Our survey of text analysis packages includes those of our own creation (cleanNLP and fasttextM) as well as packages built by other research groups (stringi, readtext, hyphenatr, quanteda, and hunspell). By operating on generic object types, these packages unite research innovations in corpus linguistics, natural language processing, machine learning, statistics, and digital humanities. We begin by extrapolating on the theoretical benefits of R as an elaborate gluing language for bringing together several areas of expertise and compare it to linguistic concordancers and other tool-based approaches to text analysis in the digital humanities. We then showcase the practical benefits of an ecosystem by illustrating how R packages have been integrated into a digital humanities project. Throughout, the focus is on moving beyond the bag-of-words, lexical frequency model by incorporating linguistically-driven analyses in research.
Methods: The data of 89 PD patients with dysphagia who underwent routinely conducted videofluoroscopic studies of swallowing (VFSS) were included in this retrospective study. The occurrence of penetration-aspiration was defined as scores >= 3 on the Penetration-Aspiration Scale (PAS). Four commonly reported signs of dysphagia in PD patients were evaluated as possible predictors. Furthermore, the relationships between the occurrence of penetration-aspiration and liquid bolus volume as well as clinical severity of PD (modified Hoehn and Yahr scale) were examined. Results: Logistic regression showed that a delayed initiation of the pharyngeal swallow (odds ratio [OR] = 7.47, P = .008) and a reduced hyolaryngeal excursion (OR = 5.13, P = .012) were predictors of penetration-aspiration. Moreover, there was a strong, positive correlation between increasing liquid bolus volume and penetration-aspiration (gamma = 0.71, P < .001). No correlation was found between severity of PD and penetration-aspiration (gamma = 0.077, P = .783). Conclusion: Results of the present study allow for a better understanding of penetration-aspiration risk in PD patients. They are useful for treatment planning in order to improve safe oral intake and adequate nutrition.
The immense popularity of online communication services in the last decade has not only upended our lives (with news spreading like wildfire on the Web, presidents announcing their decisions on Twitter, and the outcome of political elections being determined on Facebook) but also dramatically increased the amount of data exchanged on these platforms. Therefore, if we wish to understand the needs of modern society better and want to protect it from new threats, we urgently need more robust, higher-quality natural language processing (NLP) applications that can recognize such necessities and menaces automatically, by analyzing uncensored texts. Unfortunately, most NLP programs today have been created for standard language, as we know it from newspapers, or, in the best case, adapted to the specifics of English social media.
This thesis reduces the existing deficit by entering the new frontier of German online communication and addressing one of its most prolific forms—users’ conversations on Twitter. In particular, it explores the ways and means by how people express their opinions on this service, examines current approaches to automatic mining of these feelings, and proposes novel methods, which outperform state-of-the-art techniques. For this purpose, I introduce a new corpus of German tweets that have been manually annotated with sentiments, their targets and holders, as well as lexical polarity items and their contextual modifiers. Using these data, I explore four major areas of sentiment research: (i) generation of sentiment lexicons, (ii) fine-grained opinion mining, (iii) message-level polarity classification, and (iv) discourse-aware sentiment analysis. In the first task, I compare three popular groups of lexicon generation methods: dictionary-, corpus-, and word-embedding–based ones, finding that dictionary-based systems generally yield better polarity lists than the last two groups. Apart from this, I propose a linear projection algorithm, whose results surpass many existing automatically-generated lexicons. Afterwords, in the second task, I examine two common approaches to automatic prediction of sentiment spans, their sources, and targets: conditional random fields (CRFs) and recurrent neural networks, obtaining higher scores with the former model and improving these results even further by redefining the structure of CRF graphs. When dealing with message-level polarity classification, I juxtapose three major sentiment paradigms: lexicon-, machine-learning–, and deep-learning–based systems, and try to unite the first and last of these method groups by introducing a bidirectional neural network with lexicon-based attention. Finally, in order to make the new classifier aware of microblogs' discourse structure, I let it separately analyze the elementary discourse units of each tweet and infer the overall polarity of a message from the scores of its EDUs with the help of two new approaches: latent-marginalized CRFs and Recursive Dirichlet Process.
There is evidence that infants start extracting words from fluent speech around 7.5 months of age (e.g., Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995) and that they use at least two mechanisms to segment words forms from fluent speech: prosodic information (e.g., Jusczyk, Cutler & Redanz, 1993) and statistical information (e.g., Saffran, Aslin & Newport, 1996). However, how these two mechanisms interact and whether they change during development is still not fully understood.
The main aim of the present work is to understand in what way different cues to word segmentation are exploited by infants when learning the language in their environment, as well as to explore whether this ability is related to later language skills. In Chapter 3 we pursued to determine the reliability of the method used in most of the experiments in the present thesis (the Headturn Preference Procedure), as well as to examine correlations and individual differences between infants’ performance and later language outcomes. In Chapter 4 we investigated how German-speaking adults weigh statistical and prosodic information for word segmentation. We familiarized adults with an auditory string in which statistical and prosodic information indicated different word boundaries and obtained both behavioral and pupillometry responses. Then, we conducted further experiments to understand in what way different cues to word segmentation are exploited by 9-month-old German-learning infants (Chapter 5) and by 6-month-old German-learning infants (Chapter 6). In addition, we conducted follow-up questionnaires with the infants and obtained language outcomes at later stages of development.
Our findings from this thesis revealed that (1) German-speaking adults show a strong weight of prosodic cues, at least for the materials used in this study and that (2) German-learning infants weight these two kind of cues differently depending on age and/or language experience. We observed that, unlike English-learning infants, 6-month-old infants relied more strongly on prosodic cues. Nine-month-olds do not show any preference for either of the cues in the word segmentation task. From the present results it remains unclear whether the ability to use prosodic cues to word segmentation relates to later language vocabulary. We speculate that prosody provides infants with their first window into the specific acoustic regularities in the signal, which enables them to master the specific stress pattern of German rapidly. Our findings are a step forwards in the understanding of an early impact of the native prosody compared to statistical learning in early word segmentation.
Children born preterm are at higher risk to develop language deficits. Auditory speech discrimination deficits may be early signs for language developmental problems. The present study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate neural speech discrimination in 15 preterm infants at term-equivalent age compared to 15 full term neonates. The full term group revealed a significantly greater hemodynamic response to forward compared to backward speech within the left hemisphere extending from superior temporal to inferior parietal and middle and inferior frontal areas. In contrast, the preterm group did not show differences in their hemodynamic responses during forward versus backward speech, thus, they did not discriminate speech from nonspeech. Groups differed significantly in their responses to forward speech, whereas they did not differ in their responses to backward speech. The significant differences between groups point to an altered development of the functional network underlying language acquisition in preterm infants as early as in term-equivalent age.
We examined gestural coordination in C1C2 (C1 stop, C2 lateral or tap) word initial clusters using articulatory (electromagnetic articulometry) and acoustic data from six speakers of Standard Peninsular Spanish. We report on patterns of voice onset time (VOT), gestural plateau duration of C1, C2, and their overlap. For VOT, as expected, place of articulation is a major factor, with velars exhibiting longer VOTs than labials. Regarding C1 plateau duration, voice and place effects were found such that voiced consonants are significantly shorter than voiceless consonants, and velars show longer duration than labials. For C2 plateau duration, lateral duration was found to vary as a function of onset complexity (C vs. CC). As for overlap, unlike in French, where articulatory data for clusters have also been examined, clusters where both C1 and C2 are voiced show more overlap than where voicing differs. Further, overlap was affected by the C2 such that clusters where C2 is a tap show less overlap than clusters where C2 is a lateral. We discuss these results in the context of work aiming to uncover phonetic (e.g., articulatory or perceptual) and phonological forces (e.g., syllabic organization) on timing.