Background: Individuals with aphasia after stroke (IWA) often present with working memory (WM) deficits. Research investigating the relationship between WM and language abilities has led to the promising hypothesis that treatments of WM could lead to improvements in language, a phenomenon known as transfer. Although recent treatment protocols have been successful in improving WM, the evidence to date is scarce and the extent to which improvements in trained tasks of WM transfer to untrained memory tasks, spoken sentence comprehension, and functional communication is yet poorly understood. Aims: We aimed at (a) investigating whether WM can be improved through an adaptive n-back training in IWA (Study 1–3); (b) testing whether WM training leads to near transfer to unpracticed WM tasks (Study 1–3), and far transfer to spoken sentence comprehension (Study 1–3), functional communication (Study 2–3), and memory in daily life in IWA (Study 2–3); and (c) evaluating the methodological quality of existing WM treatments in IWA (Study 3). To address these goals, we conducted two empirical studies – a case-controls study with Hungarian speaking IWA (Study 1) and a multiple baseline study with German speaking IWA (Study 2) – and a systematic review (Study 3). Methods: In Study 1 and 2 participants with chronic, post-stroke aphasia performed an adaptive, computerized n-back training. ‘Adaptivity’ was implemented by adjusting the tasks’ difficulty level according to the participants’ performance, ensuring that they always practiced at an optimal level of difficulty. To assess the specificity of transfer effects and to better understand the underlying mechanisms of transfer on spoken sentence comprehension, we included an outcome measure testing specific syntactic structures that have been proposed to involve WM processes (e.g., non-canonical structures with varying complexity). Results: We detected a mixed pattern of training and transfer effects across individuals: five participants out of six significantly improved in the n-back training. Our most important finding is that all six participants improved significantly in spoken sentence comprehension (i.e., far transfer effects). In addition, we also found far transfer to functional communication (in two participants out of three in Study 2) and everyday memory functioning (in all three participants in Study 2), and near transfer to unpracticed n-back tasks (in four participants out of six). Pooled data analysis of Study 1 and 2 showed a significant negative relationship between initial spoken sentence comprehension and the amount of improvement in this ability, suggesting that the more severe the participants’ spoken sentence comprehension deficit was at the beginning of training, the more they improved after training. Taken together, we detected both near far and transfer effects in our studies, but the effects varied across participants. The systematic review evaluating the methodological quality of existing WM treatments in stroke IWA (Study 3) showed poor internal and external validity across the included 17 studies. Poor internal validity was mainly due to use of inappropriate design, lack of randomization of study phases, lack of blinding of participants and/or assessors, and insufficient sampling. Low external validity was mainly related to incomplete information on the setting, lack of use of appropriate analysis or justification for the suitability of the analysis procedure used, and lack of replication across participants and/or behaviors. Results in terms of WM, spoken sentence comprehension, and reading are promising, but further studies with more rigorous methodology and stronger experimental control are needed to determine the beneficial effects of WM intervention. Conclusions: Results of the empirical studies suggest that WM can be improved with a computerized and adaptive WM training, and improvements can lead to transfer effects to spoken sentence comprehension and functional communication in some individuals with chronic post-stroke aphasia. The fact that improvements were not specific to certain syntactic structures (i.e., non-canonical complex sentences) in spoken sentence comprehension suggest that WM is not involved in the online, automatic processing of syntactic information (i.e., parsing and interpretation), but plays a more general role in the later stage of spoken sentence comprehension (i.e., post-interpretive comprehension). The individual differences in treatment outcomes call for future research to clarify how far these results are generalizable to the population level of IWA. Future studies are needed to identify a few mechanisms that may generalize to at least a subpopulation of IWA as well as to investigate baseline non-linguistic cognitive and language abilities that may play a role in transfer effects and the maintenance of such effects. These may require larger yet homogenous samples.

Over the last decades mechanisms of recognition of morphologically complex words have been extensively examined in order to determine whether all word forms are stored and retrieved from the mental lexicon as wholes or whether they are decomposed into their morphological constituents such as stems and affixes. Most of the research in this domain focusses on English. Several factors have been argued to affect morphological processing including, for instance, morphological structure of a word (e.g., existence of allomorphic stem alternations) and its linguistic nature (e.g., whether it is a derived word or an inflected word form). It is not clear, however, whether processing accounts based on experimental evidence from English would hold for other languages. Furthermore, there is evidence that processing mechanisms may differ across various populations including children, adult native speakers and language learners. Recent studies claim that processing mechanisms could also differ between older and younger adults (Clahsen & Reifegerste, 2017; Reifegerste, Meyer, & Zwitserlood, 2017). The present thesis examined how properties of the morphological structure, types of linguistic operations involved (i.e., the linguistic contrast between inflection and derivation) and characteristics of the particular population such as older adults (e.g., potential effects of ageing as a result of the cognitive decline or greater experience and exposure of older adults) affect initial, supposedly automatic stages of morphological processing in Russian and German. To this end, a series of masked priming experiments was conducted. In experiments on Russian, the processing of derived -ost’ nouns (e.g., glupost’ ‘stupidity’) and of inflected forms with and without allomorphic stem alternations in 1P.Sg.Pr. (e.g., igraju – igrat’ ‘to play’ vs. košu – kosit’ ‘to mow’) was examined. The first experiment on German examined and directly compared processing of derived -ung nouns (e.g., Gründung ‘foundation’) and inflected -t past participles (e.g., gegründet ‘founded’), whereas the second one investigated the processing of regular and irregular plural forms (-s forms such as Autos ‘cars’ and -er forms such as Kinder ‘children’, respectively). The experiments on both languages have shown robust and comparable facilitation effects for derived words and regularly inflected forms without stem changes (-t participles in German, forms of -aj verbs in Russian). Observed morphological priming effects could be clearly distinguished from purely semantic or orthographic relatedness between words. At the same time, we found a contrast between forms with and without allomorphic stem alternations in Russian and regular and irregular forms in German, with significantly more priming for unmarked stems (relative to alternated ones) and significantly more priming for regular (compared) word forms. These findings indicate the relevance of morphological properties of a word for initial stages of processing, contrary to claims made in the literature holding that priming effects are determined by surface form and meaning overlap only. Instead, our findings are more consistent with approaches positing a contrast between combinatorial, rule-based and lexically-stored forms (Clahsen, Sonnenstuhl, & Blevins, 2003). The doctoral dissertation also addressed the role of ageing and age-related cognitive changes on morphological processing. The results obtained on this research issue are twofold. On the one hand, the data demonstrate effects of ageing on general measures of language performance, i.e., overall longer reaction times and/or higher accuracy rates in older than younger individuals. These findings replicate results from previous studies, which have been linked to the general slowing of processing speed at older age and to the larger vocabularies of older adults. One the other hand, we found that more specific aspects of language processing appear to be largely intact in older adults as revealed by largely similar morphological priming effects for older and younger adults. These latter results indicate that initial stages of morphological processing investigated here by means of the masked priming paradigm persist in older age. One caveat should, however, be noted. Achieving the same performance as a younger individual in a behavioral task may not necessarily mean that the same neural processes are involved. Older people may have to recruit a wider brain network than younger individuals, for example. To address this and related possibilities, future studies should examine older people’s neural representations and mechanisms involved in morphological processing.

This study adopts a cognitive approach to the analysis of the use of the Spanish imperfecto as a construal form for the conceptualization of state of affairs in certain journalistic texts. In doing so, the main focus of the study is to investigate cognitive processes like modalization and subjectivization, which are related to the speaker’s standpoint and to his subjective, not grammatically motivated, decision to use the imperfective instead of the perfective form. By the help of the corpus programmes GlossaNet and CREA (corpus of the Real Academia Española) we analyze the imperfective use of some Spanish verbs, which are semantically perfective in nature so that the normative use would require a perfective form. In other words, we investigate how the speaker/journalist construes a reality or situation to be expressed by means of the imperfecto and show that this use of the imperfect is typical for journalistic discourse.

Die Arbeit untersucht die Anglizismen im gruppenspezifischen Wortschaft der russischsprachigen Brettspielergemeinschaft, welche, wegen einer Konstellation von objektiven Faktoren, einem intensiven Kontakt mit der englischen Sprache ausgesetzt ist. Das erste Kapitel bereitet die theoretische Basis der Studie vor; es geht auf die innersprachlichen und außersprachlichen Ursachen der Änderungs- und Entwicklungsprozesse im Wortschatz ein, mit dem Schwerpunkt auf den Faktoren, die insbesondere für die informelle Kommunikation relevant sind wie Sprachökonomie und Bedarf an Mitteln der emotionellen Expressivität. Analysiert werden auch konkrete Prozesse der Wortschatzreorganisation und -expansion mit dem Focus auf der Entlehnung und den damit verbundenen Verfahren wie Konversion und Derivation. Als Einzelfall wird der Zustrom von Anglizismen in die russische Sprache ab Ende des 20. Jh. thematisiert. Das zweite Kapitel bietet einen kurzen Überblick über die Geschichte von Brettspielen im Allgemeinen und insbesondere über den Werdegang der modernen Hobbybrettspielen als Kulturfernomen. Das dritte Kapitel präsentiert nämlich die Ergebnisse der Analyse von Texten (Rezensionen, Kommentaren etc.) auf der Web-Seite https://tesera.ru (größtes Internet-Portal über Brettspiele im russischsprachigen Raum, etwa 30.000 registrierte Nutzer). Zuerst wird, anhand von konkreten Beispielen, in die Motivation hinter Entlehnung eingegangen, vom Sachzwang zur emotionellen Anziehungskraft des Englischen. Danach wird die Struktur des Lehngutes im Zielkorpus analysiert, wobei auf der traditionellen Gliederung ins evidente und latente Lehngut gebaut wird. Ein interessanter Aspekt, der in diesem Zusammenhang thematisiert wird, ist das Entstehen von neuen Paaren von Homonymen infolge der rezenten Entlehnungen. Die letzte Dimension der Analyse umfasst den Verlauf der Integration von den neuen Entlehnungen in das phonetische und grammatische System des Russischen wie auch deren Einbezug in Derivationsprozesse. Endlicht werden die Schlussfolgerungen zusammengefasst und die Linien für eventuelle weitere Studien definiert. Die im Korpus entdeckten Entlehnungen sind in einem Anhang zur Masterarbeit aufgelistet.

This thesis investigates the processing and representation of (ir-)regularity in inflectional verb morphology in German and English. The focus lies on the predictions from models of morphological processing about the production of subtypes of irregular verbs which are usually subsumed under the category `irregular verbs'. Thus, this dissertation presents three journal articles investigating the language production of healthy speakers and speakers with agrammatic aphasia in order to fill a gap both for the availability of language production data and systematically tested patterns of irregularity. The second Chapter set out to investigate whether regularity of a verb or its phonological complexity (measured in number of phonemes) better predict the production accuracies of German speakers with agrammatic aphasia. While regular verbs were significantly more often correct than mixed and irregular verbs, production accuracies of irregular and mixed verbs for impaired participants did not differ. Thus, no influence of phonological complexity was observed. Chapter 3 aimed at teasing apart the influence of stem changes and affix type on the production accuracies of English speaking individuals with agrammatic aphasia. The analyses revealed that the presence of stem changes but not the type of affix had a significant effect on the production accuracies. Moreover, as four different verb types were tested, results showed that production accuracies did not conform to a regular-irregular distinction but that accuracies differed by the degree of regularity. In Chapter 4, long-lag primed picture naming design was used to study if the differences found in the production accuracies of Chapter 3 were also associated with differences in production latencies of non-brain damaged speakers. A morphological priming effect was found, however, in neither experiment the effect differed of the three verb types tested. In addition to standard frequentist analysis, Bayesian analysis were performed. In this way the absence of a difference of the morphological priming effect between verb types was interpreted as actual evidence for the lack of such a difference. Hence, this thesis presents diverging results on the production of subtypes of irregular verbs in healthy and impaired adult speakers. However, at the same time these results provided evidence that the conventional regular-irregular distinction is not adequate for testing models of morphological processing.