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Dutch allows for variation as to whether the first position in the sentence is occupied by the subject or by some other constituent, such as the direct object. In particular situations, however, this commonly observed variation in word order is ‘frozen’ and only the subject appears in first position. We hypothesize that this partial freezing of word order in Dutch can be explained from the dependence of the speaker’s choice of word order on the hearer’s interpretation of this word order. A formal model of this interaction between the speaker’s perspective and the hearer’s perspective is presented in terms of bidirectional Optimality Theory. Empirical predictions of this model regarding the interaction between word order and definiteness are confirmed by a quantitative corpus study.
Left peripheral focus
(2010)
In Czech, German, and many other languages, part of the semantic focus
of the utterance can be moved to the left periphery of the clause. The main generalization is that only the leftmost accented part of the semantic focus can be moved. We propose that movement to the left periphery is generally triggered by an unspecific edge feature of C (Chomsky 2008) and its restrictions can be attributed to requirements of cyclic linearization, modifying the theory of cyclic linearization developed by Fox and Pesetsky (2005). The crucial assumption is that structural accent is a direct consequence of being linearized at merge, thus it is indirectly relevant for (locality restrictions on) movement. The absence of structural accent correlates with given-ness. Given elements may later receive (topic or contrastive) accents, which accounts for fronting in multiple focus/contrastive topic constructions. Without any additional assumptions, the model can account for movement of pragmatically unmarked elements to the left periphery (‘formal fronting’, Frey 2005). Crucially, the analysis makes no reference at all to concepts of information structure in the syntax, in line with the claim of Chomsky (2008) that UG specifies no direct link between syntax and information structure.
The notion of ‘epiphenomenon’ is usually used to exclude certain
aspects of a scientific object because they are considered to be deduced from others. In linguistics, restrictions of the research object were made, invoking the notion of ‘epiphenomenon’, which was partially done with a polemical attitude, and was always responded to polemically. The best-known definition of languages as an epiphenomenon is that proposed by Chomsky, who declared that the specific realisations of language do not warrant scientific attention, but there were early relegations of properties of individual languages to the domain of an epiphenomenon of grammar, to the domain of an art and not a science. These relegations from a certain point of abstraction did advance theories of language, even though they took a point of abstraction that did not correspond to the complexity of language.
Interlocutors typically link their utterances to the discourse environment and enrich communication by linguistic (e.g., information packaging) and extra-linguistic (e.g., eye gaze, gestures) means to optimize information transfer. Psycholinguistic studies underline that ‒for meaning computation‒ listeners profit from linguistic and visual cues that draw their focus of attention to salient information. This dissertation is the first work that examines how linguistic compared to visual salience cues influence sentence comprehension using the very same experimental paradigms and materials, that is, German subject-before-object (SO) and object-before-subject (OS) sentences, across the two cue modalities. Linguistic salience was induced by indicating a referent as the aboutness topic. Visual salience was induced by implicit (i.e., unconscious) or explicit (i.e., shared) manipulations of listeners’ attention to a depicted referent.
In Study 1, a selective, facilitative impact of linguistic salience on the context-sensitive OS word order was found using offline comprehensibility judgments. More precisely, during online sentence processing, this impact was characterized by a reduced sentence-initial Late positivity which reflects reduced processing costs for updating the current mental representation of discourse. This facilitative impact of linguistic salience was not replicated by means of an implicit visual cue (Study 2) shown to modulate word order preferences during sentence production. However, a gaze shift to a depicted referent as an indicator of shared attention eased sentence-initial processing similar to linguistic salience as revealed by reduced reading times (Study 3). Yet, this cue did not modulate the strong subject-antecedent preference during later pronoun resolution like linguistic salience. Taken together, these findings suggest a significant impact of linguistic and visual salience cues on sentence comprehension, which substantiates that both the information delivered via language and via the visual environment is integrated into the mental representation of the discourse; but, the way how salience is induced is crucial to its impact.
This article offers an in-depth analysis of one particular type of meta-talk. It looks at how speakers use the meta-pragmatic claim to have previously communicated ('said' or 'meant') the same as, or the equivalent of, what their interlocutor just said. Through detailed sequential analyses, it is shown that this claim is frequently used as a practice for disarming disaffiliative responses and thus to manage (and often resolve) incipient disagreement. Besides unpacking the precise mechanisms underlying this practice, the paper also takes stock of the various (and partly variable) lexico-morpho-syntactic, prosodic and bodily-visual elements of conduct that recurrently enter into its composition. Since the practice essentially rests on the speaker’s insinuation of having been misunderstood by their co-participant, its relationship to the organization of repair will also be discussed. It is argued that the practice operates precisely at the intersection of stance-management (agreement/disagreement) and repair, and that it exhibits features which reflect this intersectional character. Data are in English.
This article offers an in-depth analysis of one particular type of meta-talk. It looks at how speakers use the meta-pragmatic claim to have previously communicated ('said' or 'meant') the same as, or the equivalent of, what their interlocutor just said. Through detailed sequential analyses, it is shown that this claim is frequently used as a practice for disarming disaffiliative responses and thus to manage (and often resolve) incipient disagreement. Besides unpacking the precise mechanisms underlying this practice, the paper also takes stock of the various (and partly variable) lexico-morpho-syntactic, prosodic and bodily-visual elements of conduct that recurrently enter into its composition. Since the practice essentially rests on the speaker’s insinuation of having been misunderstood by their co-participant, its relationship to the organization of repair will also be discussed. It is argued that the practice operates precisely at the intersection of stance-management (agreement/disagreement) and repair, and that it exhibits features which reflect this intersectional character. Data are in English.
With its transparent orthography, Standard Indonesian is spoken by over 160 million inhabitants and is the primary language of instruction in education and the government in Indonesia. An assessment battery of reading and reading-related skills was developed as a starting point for the diagnosis of dyslexia in beginner learners. Founded on the International Dyslexia Association’s definition of dyslexia, the test battery comprises nine empirically motivated reading and reading-related tasks assessing word reading, pseudoword reading, arithmetic, rapid automatized naming, phoneme deletion, forward and backward digit span, verbal fluency, orthographic choice (spelling), and writing. The test was validated by computing the relationships between the outcomes on the reading-skills and reading-related measures by means of correlation and factor analyses. External variables, i.e., school grades and teacher ratings of the reading and learning abilities of individual students, were also utilized to provide evidence of its construct validity. Four variables were found to be significantly related with reading-skill measures: phonological awareness, rapid naming, spelling, and digit span. The current study on reading development in Standard Indonesian confirms findings from other languages with transparent orthographies and suggests a test battery including preliminary norm scores for screening and assessment of elementary school children learning to read Standard Indonesian.
Das 11. Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik mit dem Schwerpunktthema »Gut gestimmt: Diagnostik und Therapie bei Dysphonie« fand am 18.11.2017 in Potsdam statt. Das Herbsttreffen wird seit 2007 jährlich vom Verband für Patholinguistik e.V. (vpl) durchgeführt. Der vorliegende Tagungsband beinhaltet die Hauptvorträge zum Schwerpunktthema sowie Beiträge zu den Kurzvorträgen »Spektrum Patholinguistik« und der Posterpräsentationen zu weiteren Themen aus der sprachtherapeutischen Forschung und Praxis.
Diese neuartige Einführung in die deutsche Grammatik verbindet schulgrammatisches Wissen und neuere Grammatikmodelle in anschaulicher und verständlicher Weise miteinander. Lehramtsstudierende können sich damit die Kenntnisse und Kompetenzen aneignen, die sie für ihr Studium und ihren künftigen Beruf brauchen, erfahrene Lehrkräfte erhalten wichtige Impulse für neue Wege im Deutschunterricht. Mit den funktional orientierten Erklärungen zum Feldermodell und den zahlreichen systematisch gestalteten Tabellen im Bereich der Verben, Nomen/Nominalgruppen, Präpositionen und Pronomen bekommt die Schulgrammatik eine tragfähige Grundlage. Die Tabellen eignen sich darüber hinaus für DaF-/DaZ-Kurse sowie für die autodidaktische Aneignung des Deutschen als Fremd- oder Zweitsprache. Die neue Auflage wurde gründlich überarbeitet und erweitert.
This study addresses the question of how age of acquisition (AoA) affects grammatical processing, specifically with respect to inflectional morphology, in bilinguals. We examined experimental data of more than 100 participants from the Russian/German community in Berlin, all of whom acquired Russian from birth and German at different ages. Using the cross-modal lexical priming technique, we investigated stem allomorphs of German verbs that encode multiple morphosyntactic features. The results revealed a striking AoA modulation of observed priming patterns, indicating efficient access to morphosyntactic features for early AoAs and a gradual decline with increasing AoAs. In addition, we found a discontinuity in the function relating AoA to morphosyntactic feature access, suggesting a sensitive period for the development of morphosyntax.
Previous cross-modal priming studies showed that lexical decisions to words after a pronoun were facilitated when these words were semantically related to the pronoun’s antecedent. These studies suggested that semantic priming effectively measured antecedent retrieval during coreference. We examined whether these effects extended to implicit reading comprehension using the N400 response. The results of three experiments did not yield strong evidence of semantic facilitation due to coreference. Further, the comparison with two additional experiments showed that N400 facilitation effects were reduced in sentences (vs. word pair paradigms) and were modulated by the case morphology of the prime word. We propose that priming effects in cross-modal experiments may have resulted from task-related strategies. More generally, the impact of sentence context and morphological information on priming effects suggests that they may depend on the extent to which the upcoming input is predicted, rather than automatic spreading activation between semantically related words.
The role of case and animacy in biand monolingual children’s sentence interpretation in German
(2019)
German-speaking children appear to have a strong N1-bias when interpreting non-canonical OVSsentences. During sentence interpretation, especially unambiguous accusative and dative case markers (den ‘the-ACC’ and dem ‘the-DAT’) weaken the N1-bias and help building up sentence interpretation strategies on the basis of morphological cues. Still, the N1-bias prevails beyond the age of five (Brandt et al. 2016, Cristante 2016, Dittmar et al. 2008) and remains until puberty (Lidzba et al. 2013). This paper investigates whether prototypical case-animacy coalitions (denACC + N INANIMATE and demDAT + N ANIMATE ) strengthen a morphologically based sentence interpretation strategy in German. The experiment discussed in this paper tests for effects of such case-animacy coalitions in mono- and bilingual primary school children. 20 German monolinguals, 12 Dutch-German and 17 Russian-German bilinguals with a mean age of 9;6 were tested in a forced-choice off-line experiment. Results indicate that case-animacy coalitions weaken the N1-bias in OVS-conditions in German monolinguals and Dutch-German bilinguals, while no effects were found for Russian-German bilinguals. Together with an analysis of individual differences, these group-specific effects are discussed in terms of a developmental approach that represents a gradual cue strength adjustment process in mono- and bilingual children.
The role of case and animacy in biand monolingual children’s sentence interpretation in German
(2019)
German-speaking children appear to have a strong N1-bias when interpreting non-canonical OVSsentences. During sentence interpretation, especially unambiguous accusative and dative case markers (den ‘the-ACC’ and dem ‘the-DAT’) weaken the N1-bias and help building up sentence interpretation strategies on the basis of morphological cues. Still, the N1-bias prevails beyond the age of five (Brandt et al. 2016, Cristante 2016, Dittmar et al. 2008) and remains until puberty (Lidzba et al. 2013). This paper investigates whether prototypical case-animacy coalitions (denACC + N INANIMATE and demDAT + N ANIMATE ) strengthen a morphologically based sentence interpretation strategy in German. The experiment discussed in this paper tests for effects of such case-animacy coalitions in mono- and bilingual primary school children. 20 German monolinguals, 12 Dutch-German and 17 Russian-German bilinguals with a mean age of 9;6 were tested in a forced-choice off-line experiment. Results indicate that case-animacy coalitions weaken the N1-bias in OVS-conditions in German monolinguals and Dutch-German bilinguals, while no effects were found for Russian-German bilinguals. Together with an analysis of individual differences, these group-specific effects are discussed in terms of a developmental approach that represents a gradual cue strength adjustment process in mono- and bilingual children.
Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, das Potenzial lateinamerikanischer Telenovelas als audiovisuelle Medien für den Fremdsprachenunterricht Spanisch und deren Eignung für die Förderung der funktionalen kommunikativen Kompetenz, der interkulturellen kommunikativen Kompetenz und der Medienkompetenz aufzuzeigen. Der Schwerpunkt dieser Untersuchung liegt dabei im lateinamerikanischen Spanisch und der lateinamerikanischen Kultur. Zu diesem Zweck werden ausgewählte Szenen aus der weltweit populärsten kolumbianischen Telenovela Yo soy Betty, la fea analysiert. Es werden zwei Szenen aus dem Arbeitsleben und zwei Szenen aus dem Privatleben in Hinblick auf die funktionale kommunikative Kompetenz untersucht. Des Weiteren werden die kulturellen Elemente in dieser Telenovela während der Analyse geschildert. Schließlich wird die Telenovela mit dem Fokus auf die Medienkompetenz, daher auf die Eigenschaften und Konventionen des Genres Telenovela, hin untersucht.
Predicate focus
(2016)
Die Publikation zu Sprachwandelprozessen im Russischen und Ukrainischen beschreibt eine ausschlaggebende Phase der neueren Sprachgeschichte Russlands und der Ukraine (1985–2008). Im Fokus steht die Anglisierung als eine der Haupttendenzen der aktuellen sprachlichen Destandardisierung europäischer Sprachen. Die Autorin zeigt am Beispiel der Anglisierung in der Werbesprache die Destandardisierung des Russischen und Ukrainischen nach 1985 auf. Diese korpusbasierte Untersuchung umfasst sowohl die quantitative (statistische) als auch die qualitative (systemlinguistische) Analyse des werbesprachlichen Korpus. Die quantitative chronologische Analyse belegt die deutlich stärkere Dynamik der Anglisierung im Ukrainischen nach 1998. Die qualitative Analyse illustriert die unterschiedlichen bzw. gemeinsamen innerlinguistischen Prozesse in beiden Sprachen, insbesondere Anglizismen-Integration und Standardisierungswege.
This paper offers an exploratory Interactional Linguistic account of the role that inferences play in episodes of ordinary conversational interaction. To this end, it systematically reconsiders the conversational practice of using the lexico-syntactic format oh that's right to implicitly claim "just-now" recollection of something previously known, but momentarily confused or forgotten. The analyses reveal that this practice typically occurs as part of a larger sequential pattern that the participants orient to and which serves as a procedure for dealing with, and generating an account for, one participant's production of an inapposite action. As will be shown, the instantiation and progressive realization of this sequential procedure requires local inferential work from the participants. While some facets of this inferential work appear to be shaped by the particular context of the ongoing interaction, others are integral to the workings of the sequence as such. Moreover, the analyses suggest that participants' understanding of oh that's right as embodying an implicit memory claim rests on an inference which is based on a kind of semantic-pragmatic compositionality. The paper thus illustrates how inferences in conversational interaction can be systematically studied and points to the merits of combining an interactional and a linguistic perspective.
In older research literature, the prose epics emerging from the court of Elisabeth of Lorraine and Nassau-Saarbrücken have repeatedly been accused of lacking structure and literariness. By contrast, this article shows that narrative principles of seriality generate the complex structure of the voluminous ›Loher und Maller‹: literary strategies of repetition and variation organize the text on different levels. Recurring narrative structures, thematic constellations and motivations as well as lexical stereotypes are part of this comprehensive principle of seriality. Not triviality and insufficiency, but structural and narrative complexity and lexical accumulation of significance characterize ›Loher und Maller‹.
The main goal of this thesis is to explore the feasibility of using cross-lingual annotation projection as a method of alleviating the task of manual coreference annotation.
To reach our goal, we build a first trilingual parallel coreference corpus that encompasses multiple genres. For the annotation of the corpus, we develop common coreference annotation guidelines that are applicable to three languages (English, German, Russian) and include a novel domain-independent typology of bridging relations as well as state-of-the-art near-identity categories.
Thereafter, we design and perform several annotation projection experiments. In the first experiment, we implement a direct projection method with only one source language. Our results indicate that, already in a knowledge-lean scenario, our projection approach is superior to the most closely related work of Postolache et al. (2006). Since the quality of the resulting annotations is to a high degree dependent on the word alignment, we demonstrate how using limited syntactic information helps to further improve mention extraction on the target side. As a next step, in our second experiment, we show how exploiting two source languages helps to improve the quality of target annotations for both language pairs by concatenating annotations projected from two source languages. Finally, we assess the projection quality in a fully automatic scenario (using automatically produced source annotations), and propose a pilot experiment on manual projection of bridging pairs.
For each of the experiments, we carry out an in-depth error analysis, and we conclude that noisy word alignments, translation divergences and morphological and syntactic differences between languages are responsible for projection errors. We systematically compare and evaluate our projection methods, and we investigate the errors both qualitatively and quantitatively in order to identify problematic cases. Finally, we discuss the applicability of our method to coreference annotations and propose several avenues of future research.
This study presents results from a cross-modal priming experiment investigating inflected verb forms of German. A group of late learners of German with Russian as their native language (L1) was compared to a control group of German L1 speakers. The experiment showed different priming patterns for the two participant groups. The L1 German data yielded a stem-priming effect for inflected forms involving regular affixation and a partial priming effect for irregular forms irrespective of stem allomorphy. By contrast, the data from the late bilinguals showed reduced priming effects for both regular and irregular forms. We argue that late learners rely more on lexically stored inflected word forms during word recognition and less on morphological parsing than native speakers.
Object and action naming in Russian- and German- speaking monolingual and bilingual children*
(2014)
The present study investigates the influence of word category on naming performance in two populations: bilingual and monolingual children. The question is whether and, if so, to what extent monolingual and bilingual children differ with respect to noun and verb naming and whether a noun bias exists in the lexical abilities of bilingual children. Picture naming of objects and actions by Russian-German bilingual children (aged 4-7 years) was compared to age-matched monolingual children. The results clearly demonstrate a naming deficit of bilingual children in comparison to monolingual children that increases with age. Noun learning is more fragile in bilingual contexts than is verb learning. In bilingual language acquisition, nouns do not predominate over verbs as much as is seen in monolingual German and Russian children. The results are discussed with respect to semantic-conceptual aspects and language-specific features of nouns and verbs, and the impact of input on the acquisition of these word categories.
Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies
facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning
children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical
development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated
for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional
verb paradigm than English. Using an elicitation task, the production
of inflected nonce verb forms (3 rd person singular with -t suffix)
with either high- or low-frequency subsyllables was tested in
sixteen German-learning children with SLI (ages 4;1–5 ;1), sixteen
TD-children matched for chronological age (CA) and fourteen TD-
children matched for verbal age (VA) (ages 3;0–3 ;11). The findings
revealed that children with SLI, but not CA- or VA-children, showed
differential performance between the two types of verbs, producing
more inflectional errors when the verb forms resulted in low-frequency
subsyllables than when they resulted in high-frequency subsyllables,
replicating the results from English-learning children.
Regular and irregular inflection in children's production has been examined in many previous studies. Yet, little is known about the processes involved in children's recognition of inflected words. To gain insight into how children process inflected words, the current study examines regular -t and irregular -n participles of German using the cross-modal priming technique testing 108 monolingual German-speaking children in two age groups (group I, mean age: 8;4, group II, mean age: 9;9) and a control group of.. adults. Although both age groups of children had the same full priming effect as adults for -t forms, only children of age group II showed an adult-like (partial) priming effect for -n participles. We argue that children (within the age range tested) employ the same mechanisms for regular inflection as adults but that the lexical retrieval processes required for irregular forms become more efficient when children get older.
Although morphosyntax has been identified as a major source of difficulty for adult (nonnative) language learners, most previous studies have examined a limited set of largely affix-based phenomena. Little is known about word-based morphosyntax in late bilinguals and of how morphosyntax is represented and processed in a nonnative speaker's lexicon. To address these questions, we report results from two behavioral experiments investigating stem variants of strong verbs in German (which encode features such as tense, person, and number) in groups of advanced adult learners as well as native speakers of German. Although the late bilinguals were highly proficient in German, the results of a lexical priming experiment revealed clear native-nonnative differences. We argue that lexical representation and processing relies less on morphosyntactic information in a nonnative than in a native language.
This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whether Kiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language High German', a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of German' speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane.
Using the eye-movement monitoring technique in two reading comprehension experiments, this study investigated the timing of constraints on wh-dependencies (so-called island constraints) in first- and second-language (L1 and L2) sentence processing. The results show that both L1 and L2 speakers of English are sensitive to extraction islands during processing, suggesting that memory storage limitations affect L1 and L2 comprehenders in essentially the same way. Furthermore, these results show that the timing of island effects in L1 compared to L2 sentence comprehension is affected differently by the type of cue (semantic fit versus filled gaps) signaling whether dependency formation is possible at a potential gap site. Even though L1 English speakers showed immediate sensitivity to filled gaps but not to lack of semantic fit, proficient German-speaking learners of English as a L2 showed the opposite sensitivity pattern. This indicates that initial wh-dependency formation in L2 processing is based on semantic feature matching rather than being structurally mediated as in L1 comprehension.
This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject-and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12; 11) with that of two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children, matched on grammar and receptive vocabulary, respectively. All groups were more accurate on subject-extracted relative clauses than object-extracted ones and, crucially, they all showed greater accuracy for sentences with dissimilar number features (i.e., one singular, one plural) on the head noun and the embedded DP. These findings are interpreted in the light of current psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in TD children and provide further insight into the linguistic nature of G-SLI.
Processes involved in late bilinguals' production of morphologically complex words were studied using an event-related brain potentials (ERP) paradigm in which EEGs were recorded during participants' silent productions of English past- and present-tense forms. Twenty-three advanced second language speakers of English (first language [L1] German) were compared to a control group of 19 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found a frontocentral negativity for regular relative to irregular past-tense forms (e.g., asked vs. held) during (silent) production, and no difference for the present-tense condition (e.g., asks vs. holds), replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. This ERP effect suggests that combinatorial processing is involved in producing regular past-tense forms, in both late bilinguals and L1 speakers. We also suggest that this paradigm is a useful tool for future studies of online language production.
The Gradient Symbolic Computation (GSC) model presented in the keynote article (Goldrick, Putnam & Schwarz) constitutes a significant theoretical development, not only as a model of bilingual code-mixing, but also as a general framework that brings together symbolic grammars and graded representations. The authors are to be commended for successfully integrating a theory of grammatical knowledge with the voluminous research on lexical co-activation in bilinguals. It is, however, unfortunate that a certain conception of bilingualism was inherited from this latter research tradition, one in which the contrast between native and non-native language takes a back seat.
The semantics of focus particles like only requires a set of alternatives (Rooth, 1992). In two experiments, we investigated the impact of such particles on the retrieval of alternatives that are mentioned in the prior context or unmentioned. The first experiment used a probe recognition task and showed that focus particles interfere with the recognition of mentioned alternatives and the rejection of unmentioned alternatives relative to a condition without a particle. A second lexical decision experiment demonstrated priming effects for mentioned and unmentioned alternatives (compared with an unrelated condition) while focus particles caused additional interference effects. Overall, our results indicate that focus particles trigger an active search for alternatives and lead to a competition between mentioned alternatives, unmentioned alternatives, and the focused element.
We asked whether invariant phonetic indices for syllable structure can be identified in a language where word-initial consonant clusters, regardless of their sonority profile, are claimed to be parsed heterosyllabically. Four speakers of Moroccan Arabic were recorded, using Electromagnetic Articulography. Pursuing previous work, we employed temporal diagnostics for syllable structure, consisting of static correspondences between any given phonological organisation and its presumed phonetic indices. We show that such correspondences offer only a partial understanding of the relation between syllabic organisation and continuous indices of that organisation. We analyse the failure of the diagnostics and put forth a new approach in which different phonological organisations prescribe different ways in which phonetic indices change as phonetic parameters are scaled. The main finding is that invariance is found in these patterns of change, rather than in static correspondences between phonological constructs and fixed values for their phonetic indices.
Much previous experimental research on morphological processing has focused on surface and meaning-level properties of morphologically complex words, without paying much attention to the morphological differences between inflectional and derivational processes. Realization-based theories of morphology, for example, assume specific morpholexical representations for derived words that distinguish them from the products of inflectional or paradigmatic processes. The present study reports results from a series of masked priming experiments investigating the processing of inflectional and derivational phenomena in native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers in a non-Indo-European language, Turkish. We specifically compared regular (Aorist) verb inflection with deadjectival nominalization, both of which are highly frequent, productive and transparent in Turkish. The experiments demonstrated different priming patterns for inflection and derivation, specifically within the L2 group. Implications of these findings are discussed both for accounts of L2 morphological processing and for the controversial linguistic distinction between inflection and derivation.
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 investigates phenomena that have been claimed to be indicative of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in German, focusing on subject-verb agreement marking. Longitudinal data from fourteen German-speaking children with SLI, seven monolingual and seven Turkish-German successive bilingual children, were examined. We found similar patterns of impairment in the two participant groups. Both the monolingual and the bilingual children with SLI had correct (present vs. preterit) tense marking and produced syntactically complex sentences such as embedded clauses and wh-questions, but were limited in reliably producing correct agreement-marked verb forms. These contrasts indicate that agreement marking is impaired in German-speaking children with SLI, without any necessary concurrent deficits in either the CP-domain or in tense marking. Our results also show that it is possible to identify SLI from an early successive bilingual child's performance in one of her two languages.
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.
Extract: Topics in psycholinguistics and the neurocognition of language rarely attract the attention of journalists or the general public. One topic that has done so, however, is the potential benefits of bilingualism for general cognitive functioning and development, and as a precaution against cognitive decline in old age. Sensational claims have been made in the public domain, mostly by journalists and politicians. Recently (September 4, 2014) The Guardian reported that “learning a foreign language can increase the size of your brain”, and Michael Gove, the UK's previous Education Secretary, noted in an interview with The Guardian (September 30, 2011) that “learning languages makes you smarter”. The present issue of BLC addresses these topics by providing a state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and experimental research on the role of bilingualism for cognition in children and adults.
Masked priming research with late (non-native) bilinguals has reported facilitation effects following morphologically derived prime words (scanner - scan). However, unlike for native speakers, there are suggestions that purely orthographic prime-target overlap (scandal - scan) also produces priming in non-native visual word recognition. Our study directly compares orthographically related and derived prime-target pairs. While native readers showed morphological but not formal overlap priming, the two prime types yielded the same magnitudes of facilitation for non-natives. We argue that early word recognition processes in a non-native language are more influenced by surface-form properties than in one's native language.
Processes involved in late bilinguals' production of morphologically complex words were studied using an event-related brain potentials (ERP) paradigm in which EEGs were recorded during participants' silent productions of English past- and present-tense forms. Twenty-three advanced second language speakers of English (first language [L1] German) were compared to a control group of 19 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found a frontocentral negativity for regular relative to irregular past-tense forms (e.g., asked vs. held) during (silent) production, and no difference for the present-tense condition (e.g., asks vs. holds), replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. This ERP effect suggests that combinatorial processing is involved in producing regular past-tense forms, in both late bilinguals and L1 speakers. We also suggest that this paradigm is a useful tool for future studies of online language production.
The aim of this thesis is to develop approaches to automatically recognise the structure of argumentation in short monological texts. This amounts to identifying the central claim of the text, supporting premises, possible objections, and counter-objections to these objections, and connecting them correspondingly to a structure that adequately describes the argumentation presented in the text.
The first step towards such an automatic analysis of the structure of argumentation is to know how to represent it. We systematically review the literature on theories of discourse, as well as on theories of the structure of argumentation against a set of requirements and desiderata, and identify the theory of J. B. Freeman (1991, 2011) as a suitable candidate to represent argumentation structure. Based on this, a scheme is derived that is able to represent complex argumentative structures and can cope with various segmentation issues typically occurring in authentic text.
In order to empirically test our scheme for reliability of annotation, we conduct several annotation experiments, the most important of which assesses the agreement in reconstructing argumentation structure. The results show that expert annotators produce very reliable annotations, while the results of non-expert annotators highly depend on their training in and commitment to the task.
We then introduce the 'microtext' corpus, a collection of short argumentative texts. We report on the creation, translation, and annotation of it and provide a variety of statistics. It is the first parallel corpus (with a German and English version) annotated with argumentation structure, and -- thanks to the work of our colleagues -- also the first annotated according to multiple theories of (global) discourse structure.
The corpus is then used to develop and evaluate approaches to automatically predict argumentation structures in a series of six studies: The first two of them focus on learning local models for different aspects of argumentation structure. In the third study, we develop the main approach proposed in this thesis for predicting globally optimal argumentation structures: the 'evidence graph' model. This model is then systematically compared to other approaches in the fourth study, and achieves state-of-the-art results on the microtext corpus. The remaining two studies aim to demonstrate the versatility and elegance of the proposed approach by predicting argumentation structures of different granularity from text, and finally by using it to translate rhetorical structure representations into argumentation structures.
We report two experiments and Bayesian modelling of the data collected. In both experiments, participants performed a long-lag primed picture naming task. Black-and-white line drawings were used as targets, which were overtly named by the participants. Their naming latencies were measured. In both experiments, primes consisted of past participle verbs (er tanzt/er hat getanzt “he dances/he has danced”) and the relationship between primes and targets was either morphological or unrelated. Experiment 1 additionally had phonologically and semantically related prime-target pairs as well as present tense primes. Both in Experiment 1 and 2, participants showed significantly faster naming latencies for morphologically related targets relative to the unrelated verb primes. In Experiment 1, no priming effects were observed in phonologically and semantically related control conditions. In addition, the production latencies were not influenced by verb type.
It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the frequency account, the Competition Model, and the incremental processing account. Study 1 presents an analysis of Tagalog child-directed speech, which showed that the dominant argument order is agent-before-patient and that morphosyntactic markers are highly valid cues to thematic role assignment. In Study 2, we used a combined self-paced listening and picture verification task to test how Tagalog-speaking adults and 5- and 7-year-old children process reversible transitive sentences. Results showed that adults performed well in all conditions, while children's accuracy and listening times for the first noun phrase indicated more difficulty in interpreting patient-initial sentences in the agent voice compared to the patient voice. The patient voice advantage is partly explained by both the frequency account and incremental processing account.
Moving arms
(2018)
Embodied cognition postulates a bi-directional link between the human body and its cognitive functions. Whether this holds for higher cognitive functions such as problem solving is unknown. We predicted that arm movement manipulations performed by the participants could affect the problem-solving solutions. We tested this prediction in quantitative reasoning tasks that allowed two solutions to each problem (addition or subtraction). In two studies with healthy adults (N=53 and N=50), we found an effect of problem-congruent movements on problem solutions. Consistent with embodied cognition, sensorimotor information gained via right or left arm movements affects the solution in different types of problem-solving tasks.
Is there an ideal time window for language acquisition after which nativelike
representation and processing are unattainable? Although this question has
been heavily debated, no consensus has been reached. Here, we present
evidence for a sensitive period in language development and show that it is
specific to grammar. We conducted a masked priming task with a group of
Turkish-German bilinguals and examined age of acquisition (AoA) effects on
the processing of complex words. We compared a subtle but meaningful
linguistic contrast, that between grammatical inflection and lexical-based
derivation. The results showed a highly selective AoA effect on inflectional
(but not derivational) priming. In addition, the effect displayed a discontinuity
indicative of a sensitive period: Priming from inflected forms was nativelike
when acquisition started before the age of 5 but declined with increasing
AoA. We conclude that the acquisition of morphological rules expressing
morphosyntactic properties is constrained by maturational factors.
Die "Europäisch-jüdischen Studien" repräsentieren die interdisziplinär vernetzte Kompetenz des neuen "Zentrums Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg" (ZJS). Das Zentrum versammelt die wichtigsten Institutionen dieser Region, die sich mit Jüdischen Studien befassen - darunter die einschlägigen Universitäten und Einrichtungen in Berlin und Potsdam. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter der Reihe zielt insbesondere auf geschichts-, geistes- und kulturwissenschaftliche Ansätze sowie auf intellektuelle, politische und religiöse Grundfragen, die jüdisches Leben und Denken heute inspirieren und in der Vergangenheit beeinflusst haben. In den BEITRÄGEN werden exzellente Monographien und Sammelbändezum gesamten Themenspektrum Jüdischer Studien veröffentlicht. Die Reihe ist peer-reviewed. In den KONTROVERSEN werden grundlegende Debatten aufgenommen, die von zeitgenössischer und publizistischer Relevanz sind. Die Reihe ist peer-reviewed. In den EDITIONEN werden Werke herausragender jüdischer Autoren neu aufgelegt.
This study investigates the comprehension of wh-questions in individuals with aphasia (IWA) speaking Turkish, a non-wh-movement language, and German, a wh-movement language. We examined six German-speaking and 11 Turkish-speaking IWA using picture-pointing tasks. Findings from our experiments show that the Turkish IWA responded more accurately to both object who and object which questions than to subject questions, while the German IWA performed better for subject which questions than in all other conditions. Using random forest models, a machine learning technique used in tree-structured classification, on the individual data revealed that both the Turkish and German IWA’s response accuracy is largely predicted by the presence of overt and unambiguous case marking. We discuss our results with regard to different theoretical approaches to the comprehension of wh-questions in aphasia.
The aim of our study was to examine the extent to which linguistic
approaches to sentence comprehension deficits in aphasia can
account for differential impairment patterns in the comprehension
of wh-questions in bilingual persons with aphasia (PWA). We investi-
gated the comprehension of subject and object wh-questions in both
Turkish, a wh-in-situ language, and German, a wh-fronting language,
in two bilingual PWA using a sentence-to-picture matching task. Both
PWA showed differential impairment patterns in their two languages.
SK, an early bilingual PWA, had particular difficulty comprehending
subject which-questions in Turkish but performed normal across all
conditions in German. CT, a late bilingual PWA, performed more
poorly for object which-questions in German than in all other condi-
tions, whilst in Turkish his accuracy was at chance level across all
conditions. We conclude that the observed patterns of selective
cross-linguistic impairments cannot solely be attributed either to
difficulty with wh-movement or to problems with the integration of
discourse-level information. Instead our results suggest that differ-
ences between our PWA’s individual bilingualism profiles (e.g. onset
of bilingualism, premorbid language dominance) considerably
affected the nature and extent of their impairments.
Khal Torabully
(2017)
Khal Torabully creates poetry and a poetics for those forgotten by history, a theorem and theory which construct a tangible and sensual landscape, allowing for an empathetically shared experience and expressing the dramatic climax of the third phase of accelerated globalization: a project that would be unthinkable without the cultural theory we now have at our disposal in the present surge of globalization. In his poetic and theoretical texts, he has paid a literary tribute to the Coolies, usually from India, but also China and many other countries. Given Torabully’s Mauritian roots, but also the worldwide migration of the Coolies themselves, the world of Coolitude is culturally and linguistically extremely diverse, making the act of translation very relevant and giving it multiple meanings. Literature brings these forgotten lives back to life and allows us to share this experience thanks to its aesthetic force. It traces the movements, which sketch trajectories functioning to this day as palimpsest-like vectors of our own paths and trajectories. The author of Chair Corail, Fragments Coolies breaks the chain of mutual exclusions, replacing it with a type of writing belonging to a wider array of expressive modes which in diasporic situations unleash polylogical and archipelagic imaginaries.
Although all bilinguals encounter cross-language interference (CLI), some bilinguals are more susceptible to interference than others. Here, we report on language performance of late bilinguals (Russian/German) on two bilingual tasks (interview, verbal fluency), their language use and switching habits. The only between-group difference was CLI: one group consistently produced significantly more errors of CLI on both tasks than the other (thereby replicating our findings from a bilingual picture naming task). This striking group difference in language control ability can only be explained by differences in cognitive control, not in language proficiency or language mode.
This paper examines phonological phrasing in the Kwa language Akan. Regressive [+ATR] vowel harmony between words (RVH) serves as a hitherto unreported diagnostic of phonological phrasing. In this paper I discuss VP-internal and NP-internal structures, as well as SVO(O) and serial verb constructions. RVH is a general process in Akan grammar, although it is blocked in certain contexts. The analysis of phonological phrasing relies on universal syntax-phonology mapping constraints whereby lexically headed syntactic phrases are mapped onto phonological phrases. Blocking contexts call for a domain-sensitive analysis of RVH assuming recursive prosodic structure which makes reference to maximal and non-maximal phonological phrases. It is proposed (i) that phonological phrase structure is isomorphic to syntactic structure in Akan, and (ii) that the process of RVH is blocked at the edge of a maximal phonological phrase; this is formulated in terms of a domain-sensitive CrispEdge constraint.
Sensitivity to salience
(2018)
Sentence comprehension is optimised by indicating entities as salient through linguistic (i.e., information-structural) or visual means. We compare how salience of a depicted referent due to a linguistic (i.e., topic status) or visual cue (i.e., a virtual person’s gaze shift) modulates sentence comprehension in German. We investigated processing of sentences with varying word order and pronoun resolution by means of self-paced reading and an antecedent choice task, respectively. Our results show that linguistic as well as visual salience cues immediately speeded up reading times of sentences mentioning the salient referent first. In contrast, for pronoun resolution, linguistic and visual cues modulated antecedent choice preferences less congruently. In sum, our findings speak in favour of a significant impact of linguistic and visual salience cues on sentence comprehension, substantiating that salient information delivered via language as well as the visual environment is integrated in the current mental representation of the discourse.
Much research on language control in bilinguals has relied on the interpretation of the costs of switching between two languages. Of the two types of costs that are linked to language control, switching costs are assumed to be transient in nature and modulated by trial-specific manipulations (e.g., by preparation time), while mixing costs are supposed to be more stable and less affected by trial-specific manipulations. The present study investigated the effect of preparation time on switching and mixing costs, revealing that both types of costs can be influenced by trial-specific manipulations.
Rhythm perception is assumed to be guided by a domain-general auditory principle, the Iambic/Trochaic Law, stating that sounds varying in intensity are grouped as strong-weak, and sounds varying in duration are grouped as weak-strong. Recently, Bhatara et al. (2013) showed that rhythmic grouping is influenced by native language experience, French listeners having weaker grouping preferences than German listeners. This study explores whether L2 knowledge and musical experience also affect rhythmic grouping. In a grouping task, French late learners of German listened to sequences of coarticulated syllables varying in either intensity or duration. Data on their language and musical experience were obtained by a questionnaire. Mixed-effect model comparisons showed influences of musical experience as well as L2 input quality and quantity on grouping preferences. These results imply that adult French listeners' sensitivity to rhythm can be enhanced through L2 and musical experience.
SOPARSE predicts so-called local coherence effects: locally plausible but globally impossible parses of substrings can exert a distracting influence during sentence processing. Additionally, it predicts digging-in effects: the longer the parser stays committed to a particular analysis, the harder it becomes to inhibit that analysis. We investigated the interaction of these two predictions using German sentences. Results from a self-paced reading study show that the processing difficulty caused by a local coherence can be reduced by first allowing the globally correct parse to become entrenched, which supports SOPARSE’s assumptions.
We elicited the production of various types of relative clauses in a group of German-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls in order to test the movement optionality account of grammatical difficulty in SLI. The results show that German-speaking children with SLI are impaired in relative clause production compared to typically developing children. The alternative structures that they produce consist of simple main clauses, as well as nominal and prepositional phrases produced in isolation, sometimes contextually appropriate, and sometimes not. Crucially for evaluating the movement optionality account, children with SLI produce very few instances of embedded clauses where the relative clause head noun is pronounced in situ; in fact, such responses are more common among the typically developing child controls. These results underscore the difficulty German-speaking children with SLI have with structures involving movement, but provide no specific support for the movement optionality account.
It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier every and make quantifier-spreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking study tested bilingual heritage Russian–English adults and investigated how they interpret of sentences like Every alligator lies in a bathtub in both languages. Participants performed a sentence–picture verification task while their eye movements were recorded. Pictures showed three pairs of alligators in bathtubs and two extra objects: elephants (Control condition), bathtubs (Overexhaustive condition), or alligators (Underexhaustive condition). Monolingual adults performed at ceiling in all conditions. Heritage language (HL) adults made 20% q-spreading errors, but only in the Overexhaustive condition, and when they made an error they spent more time looking at the two extra bathtubs during the Verb region. We attribute q-spreading in HL speakers to cognitive overload caused by the necessity to integrate conflicting sources of information, i.e. the spoken sentences in their weaker, heritage, language and attention-demanding visual context, that differed with respect to referential salience.
We report the results from two experiments investigating how referential context information affects native and non-native readers’ interpretation of ambiguous relative clauses in sentences such as The journalist interviewed the assistant of the inspector who was looking very serious. The preceding discourse context was manipulated such that it provided two potential referents for either the first (the assistant) or the second (the inspector) of the two noun phrases that could potentially host the relative clause, thus biasing towards either an NP1 or an NP2 modification reading. The results from an offline comprehension task indicate that both native English speakers’ and German and Chinese-speaking ESL learners’ ultimate interpretation preferences were reliably influenced by the type of referential context. In contrast, in a corresponding self-paced-reading task we found that referential context information modulated only the non-native participants’ disambiguation preferences but not the native speakers’. Our results corroborate and extend previous findings suggesting that non-native comprehenders’ initial analysis of structurally ambiguous input is strongly influenced by biasing discourse information.
In recent years, the category of evidentiality has also come into use for the description of Romance languages and of German. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. We consider evidentiality to be a structural dimension of grammar, the values of which are expressed by types of constructions that code the source of information which a speaker imparts. If we look at the situation in Romance languages and in German, drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality presents problems that are difficult to solve. Adding markers of the source of the speaker's knowledge often limits the degree of responsibility of the speaker for the content of the utterance. Evidential adverbs are a frequently used means of marking the source of the speaker's knowledge. The evidential meaning is generalised to marking any source of knowledge, what can be regarded as a result of a process of pragmaticalisation. The use of certain means which also carry out evidential markings can even contribute to the blurring of the different kinds of evidentiality. German also has modal verbs which in conjunction with the perfect tense of the verb have a predominantly evidential use (sollen and wollen). But even here the evidential marking is not without influence on the modality of the utterance. The Romance languages, however, do not have such specialised verbs for expressing evidentiality in certain contexts. To do this, they mark evidentiality - often context bound - by verb forms such as the conditional and the imperfect tense. This article shall contrast the different architectures used in expressing evidentiality in German and in the Romance languages.
OCP-Place, a cross-linguistically well-attested constraint against pairs of consonants with shared [place], is psychologically real. Studies have shown that the processing of words violating OCP-Place is inhibited. Functionalists assume that OCP arises as a consequence of low-level perception: a consonant following another with the same [place] cannot be faithfully perceived as an independent unit. If functionalist theories were correct, then lexical access would be inhibited if two homorganic consonants conjoin at word boundaries-a problem that can only be solved with lexical feedback.
Here, we experimentally challenge the functional account by showing that OCP-Place can be used as a speech segmentation cue during pre-lexical processing without lexical feedback, and that the use relates to distributions in the input.
In Experiment 1, native listeners of Dutch located word boundaries between two labials when segmenting an artificial language. This indicates a use of OCP-Labial as a segmentation cue, implying a full perception of both labials. Experiment 2 shows that segmentation performance cannot solely be explained by well-formedness intuitions. Experiment 3 shows that knowledge of OCP-Place depends on language-specific input: in Dutch, co-occurrences of labials are under-represented, but co-occurrences of coronals are not. Accordingly, Dutch listeners fail to use OCP-Coronal for segmentation.
We report findings from psycholinguistic experiments investigating the detailed timing of processing morphologically complex words by proficient adult second (L2) language learners of English in comparison to adult native (L1) speakers of English. The first study employed the masked priming technique to investigate -ed forms with a group of advanced Arabic-speaking learners of English. The results replicate previously found L1/L2 differences in morphological priming, even though in the present experiment an extra temporal delay was offered after the presentation of the prime words.
The second study examined the timing of constraints against inflected forms inside derived words in English using the eye-movement monitoring technique and an additional acceptability judgment task with highly advanced Dutch L2 learners of English in comparison to adult L1 English controls. Whilst offline the L2 learners performed native-like, the eye-movement data showed that their online processing was not affected by the morphological constraint against regular plurals inside derived words in the same way as in native speakers. Taken together, these findings indicate that L2 learners are not just slower than native speakers in processing morphologically complex words, but that the L2 comprehension system employs real-time grammatical analysis (in this case, morphological information) less than the L1 system.
Interactional linguistics
(2018)
The first textbook dedicated to interactional linguistics, focusing on linguistic analyses of conversational phenomena, this introduction provides an overview of the theory and methodology of interactional linguistics. Reviewing recent findings on linguistic practices used in turn construction and turn taking, repair, action formation, ascription, and sequence and topic organization, the book examines the way that linguistic units of varying size - sentences, clauses, phrases, clause combinations, and particles - are mobilized for the implementation of specific actions in talk-in-interaction. A final chapter discusses the implications of an interactional perspective for our understanding of language as well as its variation, diversity, and universality. Supplementary online chapters explore additional topics such as the linguistic organization of preference, stance, footing, and storytelling, as well as the use of prosody and phonetics, and further practices with language. Featuring summary boxes and transcripts from recordings of everyday conversation, this is an essential resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses on language in social interaction.
Diagnostik und Therapie von Lese-Rechtschreibschwierigkeiten in der integrativen Lerntherapie
(2017)
The German sibilant /integral/ is produced with a constriction in the postalveolar region and often with protruded lips. By covarying horizontal lip and tongue position speakers can keep a similar acoustic output even if the articulation varies. This study investigates whether during two weeks of adaptation to an artificial palate speakers covary these two articulatory parameters, whether tactile landmarks have an influence on the covariation and to what extent speakers can foresee the acoustic result of the covariation without auditory feedback. Six German speakers were recorded with EMA. Four of them showed a covariation of lip and tongue, which is consistent with the motor equivalence hypothesis. The acoustic output, however, does not stay entirely constant but varies with the tongue position. The role of tactile landmarks is negligible. To a certain extent, speakers are able to adapt even without auditory feedback.
This article presents data from three production experiments investigating the prosodic means of encoding information structure in Akan, a tone language that belongs to the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo family, spoken in Ghana. Information structure was elicited via context questions that put target words either in wide, informational, or corrective focus, or in one of the experiments also in pre-focal or post-focal position rendering it as given. The prosodic parameters F0 and duration were measured on the target words. Duration is not consistently affected by information structure, but contrary to the prediction that High (H) and Low (L) tones are raised in ex situ (fronted) focus constructions we found a significantly lower realization of both H and L tones under corrective focus in ex situ and in situ focus constructions. Givenness does not seem to be marked prosodically. The data suggest that pragmatic prominence is expressed prosodically by means of a deviation from an unmarked prosodic structure. Results are thus contradicting the view of the effort code that predicts a positive correlation of more effort resulting in higher F0 targets.
Das 10. Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik mit dem Schwerpunktthema »Panorama Patholinguistik: Sprachwissenschaft trifft Sprachtherapie« fand am 19.11.2016 in Potsdam statt. Das Herbsttreffen wird seit 2007 jährlich vom Verband für Patholinguistik e.V. (vpl) durchgeführt. Der vorliegende Tagungsband beinhaltet die vier Hauptvorträge zum Schwerpunktthema sowie Beiträge zu den Kurzvorträgen »Patholinguistik im Fokus« und der Posterpräsentationen zu weiteren Themen aus der sprachtherapeutischen Forschung und Praxis.
In two self-paced reading experiments, we investigated the effect of changes in antecedent complexity on processing times for ellipsis. Pointer- or “sharing”-based approaches to ellipsis processing (Frazier & Clifton 2001, 2005; Martin & McElree 2008) predict no effect of antecedent complexity on reading times at the ellipsis site while other accounts predict increased antecedent complexity to either slow down processing (Murphy 1985) or to speed it up (Hofmeister 2011). Experiment 1 manipulated antecedent complexity and elision, yielding evidence against a speedup at the ellipsis site and in favor of a null effect. In order to investigate possible superficial processing on part of participants, Experiment 2 manipulated the amount of attention required to correctly respond to end-of-sentence comprehension probes, yielding evidence against a complexity-induced slowdown at the ellipsis site. Overall, our results are compatible with pointer-based approaches while casting doubt on the notion that changes antecedent complexity lead to measurable differences in ellipsis processing speed.
In two self-paced reading experiments, we investigated the effect of changes in antecedent complexity on processing times for ellipsis. Pointer- or “sharing”-based approaches to ellipsis processing (Frazier & Clifton 2001, 2005; Martin & McElree 2008) predict no effect of antecedent complexity on reading times at the ellipsis site while other accounts predict increased antecedent complexity to either slow down processing (Murphy 1985) or to speed it up (Hofmeister 2011). Experiment 1 manipulated antecedent complexity and elision, yielding evidence against a speedup at the ellipsis site and in favor of a null effect. In order to investigate possible superficial processing on part of participants, Experiment 2 manipulated the amount of attention required to correctly respond to end-of-sentence comprehension probes, yielding evidence against a complexity-induced slowdown at the ellipsis site. Overall, our results are compatible with pointer-based approaches while casting doubt on the notion that changes antecedent complexity lead to measurable differences in ellipsis processing speed.
Mentor Texts
(2017)
„Könn’Se berlinern?“
(2017)
Literarische Spurensuche
(2017)
Region und Varietät
(2017)
Mundos comunes
(2017)
A partir de la constatación de una serie de movimientos y diálogos artísticos, correspondientes a las décadas del setenta y ochenta, su tesis doctoral interroga la noción de “lo latinoamericano” en el ámbito del arte y la cultura. La investigación realiza un “viaje recopilatorio” de documentos a través de distintas ciudades europeas que permiten problematizar el lugar, la comunidad y la memoria cultural de lo latinoamericano.
Region – Sprache – Literatur
(2017)
Mit dem neuen Rahmenlehrplan für die Länder Brandenburg und Berlin wird der Kompetenzentwicklung der Schülerinnen und Schüler unter den Bedingungen lebensweltlicher Erfahrungen ein besonderer Stellenwert beigemessen. Der Sammelband enthält Beiträge, in denen den Lehrerinnen und Lehrern vielfältige Unterrichtsmaterialien und didaktische Anregungen für einen praxisnahen, entdeckenden Unterricht in der Primar- und Sekundarstufe für den Deutschunterricht vorgestellt werden. Diese reichen von theoretischen Grundlagen, über einzelne Unterrichtssequenzen und Projekte bis zur Darstellung einer Lernspirale für die Jahrgangsstufen 1 bis 10. Vielfältige, auch multimediale Zugänge bis zum spielerischen Umgang mit der Sprache zeigen, dass Sprache kein „trockener“ Lerngegenstand sein muss. Die Beiträge geben darüber hinaus Einblicke in die fachlichen Hintergründe, die helfen sollen, den Zugang zu den einzelnen Gegenständen zu erleichtern. Das thematische Zentrum „Region“ bildet den Ausgangspunkt für die Einbeziehung des Niederdeutschen, Sorbischen, Berlinischen, Kiezdeutschen sowie der Dialekte. Dabei werden sowohl literarische als auch Sachtexte berücksichtigt.