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"Wortabruf im Handumdrehen"?
(2017)
Successful sentence comprehension requires the comprehender to correctly figure out who did what to whom. For example, in the sentence John kicked the ball, the comprehender has to figure out who did the action of kicking and what was being kicked. This process of identifying and connecting the syntactically-related words in a sentence is called dependency completion. What are the cognitive constraints that determine dependency completion? A widely-accepted theory is cue-based retrieval. The theory maintains that dependency completion is driven by a content-addressable search for the co-dependents in memory. The cue-based retrieval explains a wide range of empirical data from several constructions including subject-verb agreement, subject-verb non-agreement, plausibility mismatch configurations, and negative polarity items.
However, there are two major empirical challenges to the theory: (i) Grammatical sentences’ data from subject-verb number agreement dependencies, where the theory predicts a slowdown at the verb in sentences like the key to the cabinet was rusty compared to the key to the cabinets was rusty, but the data are inconsistent with this prediction; and, (ii) Data from antecedent-reflexive dependencies, where a facilitation in reading times is predicted at the reflexive in the bodybuilder who worked with the trainers injured themselves vs. the bodybuilder who worked with the trainer injured themselves, but the data do not show a facilitatory effect.
The work presented in this dissertation is dedicated to building a more general theory of dependency completion that can account for the above two datasets without losing the original empirical coverage of the cue-based retrieval assumption. In two journal articles, I present computational modeling work that addresses the above two empirical challenges.
To explain the grammatical sentences’ data from subject-verb number agreement dependencies, I propose a new model that assumes that the cue-based retrieval operates on a probabilistically distorted representation of nouns in memory (Article I). This hybrid distortion-plus-retrieval model was compared against the existing candidate models using data from 17 studies on subject-verb number agreement in 4 languages. I find that the hybrid model outperforms the existing models of number agreement processing suggesting that the cue-based retrieval theory must incorporate a feature distortion assumption.
To account for the absence of facilitatory effect in antecedent-reflexive dependencies, I propose an individual difference model, which was built within the cue-based retrieval framework (Article II). The model assumes that individuals may differ in how strongly they weigh a syntactic cue over a number cue. The model was fitted to data from two studies on antecedent-reflexive dependencies, and the participant-level cue-weighting was estimated. We find that one-fourth of the participants, in both studies, weigh the syntactic cue higher than the number cue in processing reflexive dependencies and the remaining participants weigh the two cues equally. The result indicates that the absence of predicted facilitatory effect at the level of grouped data is driven by some, not all, participants who weigh syntactic cues higher than the number cue. More generally, the result demonstrates that the assumption of differential cue weighting is important for a theory of dependency completion processes. This differential cue weighting idea was independently supported by a modeling study on subject-verb non-agreement dependencies (Article III).
Overall, the cue-based retrieval, which is a general theory of dependency completion, needs to incorporate two new assumptions: (i) the nouns stored in memory can undergo probabilistic feature distortion, and (ii) the linguistic cues used for retrieval can be weighted differentially. This is the cumulative result of the modeling work presented in this dissertation.
The dissertation makes an important theoretical contribution: Sentence comprehension in humans is driven by a mechanism that assumes cue-based retrieval, probabilistic feature distortion, and differential cue weighting. This insight is theoretically important because there is some independent support for these three assumptions in sentence processing and the broader memory literature. The modeling work presented here is also methodologically important because for the first time, it demonstrates (i) how the complex models of sentence processing can be evaluated using data from multiple studies simultaneously, without oversimplifying the models, and (ii) how the inferences drawn from the individual-level behavior can be used in theory development.
The aim of this dissertation was to conduct a larger-scale cross-linguistic empirical investigation of similarity-based interference effects in sentence comprehension.
Interference studies can offer valuable insights into the mechanisms that are involved in long-distance dependency completion.
Many studies have investigated similarity-based interference effects, showing that syntactic and semantic information are employed during long-distance dependency formation (e.g., Arnett & Wagers, 2017; Cunnings & Sturt, 2018; Van Dyke, 2007, Van Dyke & Lewis, 2003; Van Dyke & McElree, 2011). Nevertheless, there are some important open questions in the interference literature that are critical to our understanding of the constraints involved in dependency resolution.
The first research question concerns the relative timing of syntactic and semantic interference in online sentence comprehension. Only few interference studies have investigated this question, and, to date, there is not enough data to draw conclusions with regard to their time course (Van Dyke, 2007; Van Dyke & McElree, 2011).
Our first cross-linguistic study explores the relative timing of syntactic and semantic interference in two eye-tracking reading experiments that implement the study design used in Van Dyke (2007). The first experiment tests English sentences. The second, larger-sample experiment investigates the two interference types in German.
Overall, the data suggest that syntactic and semantic interference can arise simultaneously during retrieval.
The second research question concerns a special case of semantic interference: We investigate whether cue-based retrieval interference can be caused by semantically similar items which are not embedded in a syntactic structure.
This second interference study builds on a landmark study by Van Dyke & McElree (2006). The study design used in their study is unique in that it is able to pin down the source of interference as a consequence of cue overload during retrieval, when semantic retrieval cues do not uniquely match the retrieval target. Unlike most other interference studies, this design is able to rule out encoding interference as an alternative explanation. Encoding accounts postulate that it is not cue overload at the retrieval site but the erroneous encoding of similar linguistic items in memory that leads to interference (Lewandowsky et al., 2008; Oberauer & Kliegl, 2006). While Van Dyke & McElree (2006) reported cue-based retrieval interference from sentence-external distractors, the evidence for this effect was weak. A subsequent study did not show interference of this type (Van Dyke et al., 2014). Given these inconclusive findings, further research is necessary to investigate semantic cue-based retrieval interference.
The second study in this dissertation provides a larger-scale cross-linguistic investigation of cue-based retrieval interference from sentence-external items. Three larger-sample eye-tracking studies in English, German, and Russian tested cue-based interference in the online processing of filler-gap dependencies. This study further extends the previous research by investigating interference in each language under varying task demands (Logačev & Vasishth, 2016; Swets et al., 2008).
Overall, we see some very modest support for proactive cue-based retrieval interference in English. Unexpectedly, this was observed only under a low task demand. In German and Russian, there is some evidence against the interference effect. It is possible that interference is attenuated in languages with richer case marking.
In sum, the cross-linguistic experiments on the time course of syntactic and semantic interference from sentence-internal distractors support existing evidence of syntactic and semantic interference during sentence comprehension. Our data further show that both types of interference effects can arise simultaneously. Our cross-linguistic experiments investigating semantic cue-based retrieval interference from sentence-external distractors suggest that this type of interference may arise only in specific linguistic contexts.
Age of acquisition (AOA) is a psycholinguistic variable that significantly influences behavioural measures (response times and accuracy rates) in tasks that require lexical and semantic processing. Its origin is – unlike the origin of semantic typicality (TYP), which is assumed at the semantic level – controversially discussed. Different theories propose AOA effects to originate either at the semantic level or at the link between semantics and phonology (lemma-level).
The dissertation aims at investigating the influence of AOA and its interdependence with the semantic variable TYP on particularly semantic processing in order to pinpoint the origin of AOA effects. Therefore, three studies have been conducted that considered the variables AOA and TYP in semantic processing tasks (category verifications and animacy decisions) by means of behavioural and partly electrophysiological (ERP) data and in different populations (healthy young and elderly participants and in semantically impaired individuals with aphasia (IWA)).
The behavioural and electrophysiological data of the three studies provide evidence for distinct processing levels of the variables AOA and TYP. The data further support previous assumptions on a semantic origin for TYP but question the same for AOA. The findings, however, support an origin of AOA effects at the transition between the word form (phonology) and the semantic level that can be captured at the behavioural but not at the electrophysiological level.
This dissertation explores whether the processing of ellipsis is affected by changes in the complexity of the antecedent, either due to added linguistic material or to the presence of a temporary ambiguity. Murphy (1985) hypothesized that ellipsis is resolved via a string copying procedure when the antecedent is within the same sentence, and that copying longer strings takes more time. Such an account also implies that the antecedent is copied without its structure, which in turn implies that recomputing its syntax and semantics may be necessary at the ellipsis gap. Alternatively, several accounts predict null effects of antecedent complexity, as well as no reparsing. These either involve a structure copying mechanism that is cost-free and whose finishing time is thus independent of the form of the antecedent (Frazier & Clifton, 2001), treat ellipsis as a pointer into content-addressable memory with direct access (Martin & McElree, 2008, 2009), or assume that one structure is ‘shared’ between antecedent and gap (Frazier & Clifton, 2005).
In a self-paced reading study on German sluicing, temporarily ambiguous garden-path clauses were used as antecedents, but no evidence of reparsing in the form of a slowdown at the ellipsis site was found. Instead, results suggest that antecedents which had been reanalyzed from an initially incorrect structure were easier to retrieve at the gap. This finding that can be explained within the framework of cue-based retrieval parsing (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005), where additional syntactic operations on a structure yield memory reactivation effects.
Two further self-paced reading studies on German bare argument ellipsis and English verb phrase ellipsis investigated if adding linguistic content to the antecedent would increase processing times for the ellipsis, and whether insufficiently demanding comprehension tasks may have been responsible for earlier null results (Frazier & Clifton, 2000; Martin & McElree, 2008). It has also been suggested that increased antecedent complexity should shorten rather than lengthen retrieval times by providing more unique memory features (Hofmeister, 2011). Both experiments failed to yield reliable evidence that antecedent complexity affects ellipsis processing times in either direction, irrespectively of task demands.
Finally, two eye-tracking studies probed more deeply into the proposed reactivation-induced speedup found in the first experiment. The first study used three different kinds of French garden-path sentences as antecedents, with two of them failing to yield evidence for reactivation. Moreover, the third sentence type showed evidence suggesting that having failed to assign a structure to the antecedent leads to a slowdown at the ellipsis site, as well as regressions towards the ambiguous part of the sentence. The second eye-tracking study used the same materials as the initial self-paced reading study on German, with results showing a pattern similar to the one originally observed, with some notable differences.
Overall, the experimental results are compatible with the view that adding linguistic material to the antecedent has no or very little effect on the ease with which ellipsis is resolved, which is consistent with the predictions of cost-free copying, pointer-based approaches and structure sharing. Additionally, effects of the antecedent’s parsing history on ellipsis processing may be due to reactivation, the availability of multiple representations in memory, or complete failure to retrieve a matching target.
Cleft exhaustivity
(2020)
In this dissertation a series of experimental studies are presented which demonstrate that the exhaustive inference of focus-background it-clefts in English and their cross-linguistic counterparts in Akan, French, and German is neither robust nor systematic. The inter-speaker and cross-linguistic variability is accounted for with a discourse-pragmatic approach to cleft exhaustivity, in which -- following Pollard & Yasavul 2016 -- the exhaustive inference is derived from an interaction with another layer of meaning, namely, the existence presupposition encoded in clefts.
The present dissertation investigates changes in lingual coarticulation across childhood in German-speaking children from three to nine years of age and adults. Coarticulation refers to the mismatch between the abstract phonological units and their seemingly commingled realization in continuous speech. Being a process at the intersection of phonology and phonetics, addressing its changes across childhood allows for insights in speech motor as well as phonological developments. Because specific predictions for changes in coarticulation across childhood can be derived from existing speech production models, investigating children’s coarticulatory patterns can help us model human speech production.
While coarticulatory changes may shed light on some of the central questions of speech production development, previous studies on the topic were sparse and presented a puzzling picture of conflicting findings. One of the reasons for this lack is the difficulty in articulatory data acquisition in a young population. Within the research program this dissertation is embedded in, we accepted this challenge and successfully set up the hitherto largest corpus of articulatory data from children using ultrasound tongue imaging. In contrast to earlier studies, a high number of participants in tight age cohorts across a wide age range and a thoroughly controlled set of pseudowords allowed for statistically powerful investigations of a process known as variable and complicated to track.
The specific focus of my studies is on lingual vocalic coarticulation as measured in the horizontal position of the highest point of the tongue dorsum. Based on three studies on a) anticipatory coarticulation towards the left, b) carryover coarticulation towards the right side of the utterance, and c) anticipatory coarticulatory extent in repeated versus read aloud speech, I deduct the following main theses:
1. Maturing speech motor control is responsible for some developmental changes in coarticulation.
2. Coarticulation can be modeled as the coproduction of articulatory gestures.
3. The developmental change in coarticulation results from a decrease of vocalic activation width.
Discourse production is crucial for communicative success and is in the core of aphasia assessment and treatment. Coherence differentiates discourse from a series of utterances/sentences; it is internal unity and connectedness, and, as such, perhaps the most inherent property of discourse. It is unclear whether people with aphasia, who experience various language production difficulties, preserve the ability to produce coherent discourse. A more general question of how coherence is established and represented linguistically has been addressed in the literature, yet remains unanswered. This dissertation presents an investigation of discourse production in aphasia and the linguistic mechanisms of establishing coherence.
My thesis focused on the predictions of the activation-based model of Lewis and Vasishth (2005) to investigate the evidence for the use of the memory system in the formation of non-local dependencies in sentence comprehension.
The activation-based model, which follows the Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational framework (ACT-R; Anderson et al., 2004), has been used to explain locality effects and similarity-based interference by assuming that dependencies are resolved by a cue-based retrieval mechanism, and that the retrieval mechanism is affected by decay and interference.
Both locality effects and (inhibitory) similarity-based interference cause increased difficulty (e.g., longer reading times) at the site of the dependency completion where a retrieval is assumed: (I) Locality effects are attributed to the increased difficulty in the retrieval of a dependent when the distance from its retrieval site is increased. (II) Similarity-based interference is attributed to the retrieval being affected by the presence of items which have similar features as the dependent that needs to be retrieved.
In this dissertation, I investigated some findings problematic to the activation-based model, namely, facilitation where locality effects are expected (e.g., Levy, 2008), and the lack of similarity-based interference from the number feature in grammatical sentences (e.g., Wagers et al., 2009). In addition, I used individual differences in working memory capacity and reading fluency as a way to validate the theories investigated (Underwood, 1975), and computational modeling to achieve a more precise account of the phenomena.
Regarding locality effects, by using self-paced reading and eye-tracking-while reading methods with Spanish and German data, this dissertation yielded two main findings: (I) Locality effects seem to be modulated by working memory capacity, with high-capacity participants showing expectation-driven facilitation. (II) Once expectations and other potential confounds are controlled using baselines, with increased distance, high-capacity readers can show a slow-down (i.e., locality effects) and low-capacity readers can show a speedup. While the locality effects are compatible with the activation-based model, simulations show that the speedup of low-capacity readers can only be accounted for by changing some of the assumptions of the activation-based model.
Regarding similarity-based interference, two relatively high-powered self-paced reading experiments in German using grammatical sentences yielded a slowdown at the verb as predicted by the activation-based model. This provides evidence in favor of dependency creation via cue-based retrieval, and in contrast with the view that cue-based retrieval is a reanalysis mechanism (Wagers et al., 2009).
Finally, the same experimental results that showed inhibitory interference from the number feature are used for a finer grain evaluation of the retrieval process. Besides Lewis and Vasishth’s (2005) activation-based model, also McElree’s (2000) direct-access model can account for inhibitory interference. These two models assume a cue-based retrieval mechanism to build dependencies, but they are based on different assumptions. I present a computational evaluation of the predictions of these two theories of retrieval. The models were compared by implementing them in a Bayesian hierarchical framework. The evaluation of the models reveals that some aspects of the data fit better under the direct access model than under the activation-based model. However, a simple extension of the activation-based model provides a comparable fit to the direct access model. This serves as a proof of concept showing potential ways to improve the original activation-based model.
In conclusion, this thesis adds to the body of evidence that argues for the use of the general memory system in dependency resolution, and in particular for a cue-based retrieval mechanism. However, it also shows that some of the default assumptions inherited from ACT-R in the activation-based model need to be revised.
Early sensitivity to prosodic phrase boundary cues: Behavioral evidence from German-learning infants
(2023)
This dissertation seeks to shed light on the relation of phrasal prosody and developmental speech perception in German-learning infants. Three independent empirical studies explore the role of acoustic correlates of major prosodic boundaries, specifically pitch change, final lengthening, and pause, in infant boundary perception. Moreover, it was examined whether the sensitivity to prosodic phrase boundary markings changes during the first year of life as a result of perceptual attunement to the ambient language (Aslin & Pisoni, 1980).
Using the headturn preference procedure six- and eight-month-old monolingual German-learning infants were tested on their discrimination of two different prosodic groupings of the same list of coordinated names either with or without an internal IPB after the second name, that is, [Moni und Lilli] [und Manu] or [Moni und Lilli und Manu]. The boundary marking was systematically varied with respect to single prosodic cues or specific cue combinations.
Results revealed that six- and eight-month-old German-learning infants successfully detect the internal prosodic boundary when it is signaled by all the three main boundary cues pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. For eight-, but not for six-month-olds, the combination of pitch change and final lengthening, without the occurrence of a pause, is sufficient. This mirrors an adult-like perception by eight-months (Holzgrefe-Lang et al., 2016). Six-month-olds detect a prosodic phrase boundary signaled by final lengthening and pause. The findings suggest a developmental change in German prosodic boundary cue perception from a strong reliance on the pause cue at six months to a differentiated sensitivity to the more subtle cues pitch change and final lengthening at eight months. Neither for six- nor for eight-month-olds the occurrence of pitch change or final lengthening as single cues is sufficient, similar to what has been observed for adult speakers of German (Holzgrefe-Lang et al., 2016).
The present dissertation provides new scientific knowledge on infants’ sensitivity to individual prosodic phrase boundary cues in the first year of life. Methodologically, the studies are pathbreaking since they used exactly the same stimulus materials – phonologically thoroughly controlled lists of names – that have also been used with adults (Holzgrefe-Lang et al., 2016) and with infants in a neurophysiological paradigm (Holzgrefe-Lang, Wellmann, Höhle, & Wartenburger, 2018), allowing for comparisons across age (six/ eight months and adults) and method (behavioral vs. neurophysiological methods). Moreover, materials are suited to be transferred to other languages allowing for a crosslinguistic comparison. Taken together with a study with similar French materials (van Ommen et al., 2020) the observed change in sensitivity in German-learning infants can be interpreted as a language-specific one, from an initial language-general processing mechanism that primarily focuses on the presence of pauses to a language-specific processing that takes into account prosodic properties available in the ambient language. The developmental pattern is discussed as an interplay of acoustic salience, prosodic typology (prosodic regularity) and cue reliability.