Project members: Ingmar Brilmayer, Petra Schumacher & Magdalena Repp (CRC 1252, C07)
In this study we examine the processing of second-person singular (2sg) pronouns in narratives and their potential self-relevance to the listener, comparing the ERP (Event-Related Potential) responses to these pronouns in two different audiobooks. Previous research by Brilmayer et al. (2019) suggested that first-person pronouns elicit an early positive ERP response due to their self-relevance. However, this study only allows conclusions about the processing of pronouns that are potentially self-relevant to others, i.e. refer to other selves. Yet, the study is uninformative with respect to pronouns that refer to the participant. In our study, we analyzed EEG data from 72 participants who listened to two audiobooks: Tschick, where 2sg pronouns refer to story characters, and Auferstehung der Toten (AdT), where these pronouns often address the listener. This design allowed us to compare the ERP responses to 2sg pronouns potentially self-relevant to the listener with those that are not. The results showed a significant effect of the audiobook factor at left and right posterior electrodes, indicating a more positive ERP response for 2sg pronouns in AdT compared to Tschick. Our findings support the hypothesis that the positive ERP effect associated with first-person pronouns extends to second-person pronouns when they are potentially self-relevant. This suggests that the enhanced positivity reflects attentional processes and increased cortical sensitivity to self-other distinctions. (Poster SNL 2024 & CogSci 2024)
Project members: Derya Çokal, Massimo Poesio, Petra Schumacher, Markus Phillip & Klaus von Heusinger (in collaboration with Queen Mary University of London & Utrecht University) (CRC 1252, C04, C07)
In communication, we often encounter referential ambiguities. While much research has focused on resolving singular personal pronouns, only a few studies have investigated the incremental processing of ambiguous plural pronouns. Research suggests that ambiguous pronouns can lead to increased processing costs, known as the "ambiguity disadvantage," due to the competition for pronoun reference among potential antecedents. This is observed in tasks such as self-paced reading, where multiple interpretations compete. However, other studies, such as those using eye-tracking, report a processing advantage for sentences with ambiguous pronouns under conditions that allow for shallow processing. This advantage is thought to reflect a sustained disequilibrium until disambiguating information is encountered.
ERP (Event-Related Potential) studies have shown different effects:
These findings highlight a contrast between ERP literature, which indicates higher processing costs, and psycholinguistic research, which suggests that shallow processing can be beneficial for incremental interpretation.
To explore this contrast, we conduct an ERP study on German plural pronouns ("sie/they"; gender-unspecific) in a task environment designed to facilitate shallow or underspecified processing. Our study examines plural pronouns with different groups (set-subset/conceptually overlapping vs. non-subset/conceptually non-overlapping) and subsequent verbal ambiguity. By investigating these dynamics, we aim to align ERP effects for ambiguous pronouns with psycholinguistic indications that incremental interpretation benefits from shallow processing. Posters on this study were presented at HSP 2024 & will be presented at AMLaP 2024.
Project members: Clare Patterson, Umesh Patil, Caterina Ventura, Maria Lialiou, Petra B. Schumacher & Stefan Hinterwimmer (CRC 1252, C07, C05)
Abstract: Demonstrative pronouns have been shown to direct the attention to an entity that is currently not the most prominent entity in discourse. German poses an interesting puzzle because it makes available two types of demonstrative pronouns with very similar interpretive preferences. Here we test a long-held explanation for the availability of two demonstrative pronouns, namely that the DPro is preferably used in the spoken modality, while the DemPro favours the written modality. In two sets of experiments, we directly compare the acceptability of the two demonstratives between spoken and written modalities. The experiments showed mixed results. While Experiment 1 registered no effect of modality, Experiment 2 revealed higher ratings for the DPro in the spoken over the written modality. We argue that the findings can be reconciled by considering register differences in the two studies, where items from Experiment 1 point to a more formal register than the items in Experiment 2. Overall, we suggest that register might be a stronger licensor for the choice of demonstrative pronouns than modality.Accepted - to be published in Linguistische Berichte.
Project members: Petra B. Schumacher, Clare Patterson & Magdalena Repp (CRC 1252, C07)
The aim of the current study is to assess the impact of the wider discourse on pronoun interpretation. We specifically look at German demonstrative pronouns (dieser) in comparison to personal pronouns (er), investigating whether dieser-demonstratives are influenced only by factors in the preceding sentence (specifically, sentence topicality) or whether they are additionally influenced by cues from the wider discourse (i.e., discourse topicality). We found that discourse topicality competes with sentence topicality for prominence, when the two cues are not aligned to one and the same referent. This had an impact on referential interpretation of both personal and demonstrative pronouns, with weakened interpretive biases when sentence and discourse topic did not converge on the same referent (Exp. 3). Our data further indicate that the introduction of a protagonist from a well-known novel blocked the emergence of the discourse topic as a prominence-lending cue for personal pronouns (Exp. 1–2). We propose that reference to the famous protagonist triggers a protagonist layer, which introduces its own set of questions under discussion, which in turn invalidates the discourse topic. Crucially, the demonstrative pronoun dieser does not consider the protagonist layer and only relies on the discourse layer for interpretation. https://doi.org/10.5070/G60111226
Project members: Timo Buchholz, Klaus von Heusinger (CRC 1252, C04)
German has two demonstrative pronoun series: the short form der, die, das, and the long form dieser, diese, dieses. Both forms can be used anaphorically, and they contrast with the personal pronouns er, sie, es in that they refer to an antecedent that is less prominent at that point in the discourse when the discourse provides different potential antecedents. Demonstrative pronouns are typically used in the preverbal position in a German sentence, i.e., the topic position. Thus, they are assumed to be topic shifters (from a non-topical antecedent to the topical argument in the current sentence). However, der can be repeated, yielding topic chains, thus referring back to a topical antecedent, while this is not the case for dieser. In this article, we argue that der and dieser both contribute to topic management, but they do this in different ways: der is a marker of a sentence topic, while dieser is a marker of discourse topic shift. We present the results of two experiments that compare the use of personal pronouns with either demonstrative pronoun manipulating sentence topic or discourse topic. First, both experiments show that the personal pronoun is not sensitive to either type of topichood of its antecedent. Second, Experiment 1 shows that both demonstrative pronouns prefer a context where discourse topic and sentence topic are shifted. Third, Experiment 2 shows that only dieser prefers a context with a shifted discourse topic, but der is not sensitive to discourse topichood alone. We take the results as supporting our claim that the two demonstratives have different discourse functions: der marks a sentence topic, while dieser is a shifter (and marker) of the discourse topic. Full article in Frontiers in Communication: https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1369290
Project members: Maria Lialiou, Jesse Harris, Martine Grice, Petra B. Schumacher (CRC 1252, A01)
This pupillometric study investigates the relevance of domain-final intonation for attention-orienting in German, employing a changing-state oddball paradigm with rising, falling and neutral intonation on deviant stimuli. Pupil dilation responses (PDR) to deviants were shown to be affected by their intonation contours, strengthening the case for the role of intonational edge tones in attention-orienting. Moreover, the magnitude and duration of the PDR response was higher for rises than falls, indicating the fundamental role of intonational rises for the activation of the attention-orienting mechanism in speech perception. This pupillometric study investigates the relevance of domain-final intonation for attention-orienting in German, employing a changing-state oddball paradigm with rising, falling and neutral intonation on deviant stimuli. Pupil dilation responses (PDR) to deviants were shown to be affected by their intonation contours, strengthening the case for the role of intonational edge tones in attention-orienting. Moreover, the magnitude and duration of the PDR response was higher for rises than falls, indicating the fundamental role of intonational rises for the activation of the attention-orienting mechanism in speech perception. Link to the full article in the CogSci proceedings: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/68q9c2r8
Project members: Maria Lialiou, Martine Grice, Christine T. Röhr & Petra B. Schumacher (CRC 1252, A01)
This article investigates the processing of intonational rises and falls when presented unexpectedly in a stream of repetitive auditory stimuli. It examines the neurophysiological correlates (ERPs) of attention to these unexpected stimuli through the use of an oddball paradigm where sequences of repetitive stimuli are occasionally interspersed with a deviant stimulus, allowing for elicitation of an MMN. Whereas previous oddball studies on attention toward unexpected sounds involving pitch rises were conducted on nonlinguistic stimuli, the present study uses as stimuli lexical items in German with naturalistic intonation contours. Results indicate that rising intonation plays a special role in attention orienting at a pre-attentive processing stage, whereas contextual meaning (here a list of items) is essential for activating attentional resources at a conscious processing stage. This is reflected in the activation of distinct brain responses: Rising intonation evokes the largest MMN, whereas falling intonation elicits a less pronounced MMN followed by a P3 (reflecting a conscious processing stage). Subsequently, we also find a complex interplay between the phonological status (i.e., accent/head marking vs. boundary/edge marking) and the direction of pitch change in their contribution to attention orienting: Attention is not oriented necessarily toward a specific position in prosodic structure (head or edge). Rather, we find that the intonation contour itself and the appropriateness of the contour in the linguistic context are the primary cues to two core mechanisms of attention orienting, pre-attentive and conscious orientation respectively, whereas the phonological status of the pitch event plays only a supplementary role. Link to the full article in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience: https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_02129
Project members: Sophie Repp & Heiko Seeliger (CRC 1252, A06)
This production study examines two rejecting speech acts (ReA) in German: plain rejections and rejecting questions (RQs), which encode speaker uncertainty regarding the rejecting act. In comparison to assertions, the ReA show increased prosodic prominence of the nuclear accent but no specialized contours signalling disagreement as observed in other languages. Rejections have a falling final contour. RQs come with two different rising contours known from other questions but may also end in a fall. Both illocutionary meaning components—non-acceptance and uncertainty—have gradient prosodic effects. Link to the full article in the proceedings of ICPhS: https://guarant.cz/icphs2023/313.pdf
Project members: Timo Buchholz & Klaus von Heusinger (CRC 1252, C04)
German has two demonstrative series, the der (die, das) series and the dieser (diese, dieses) series. Both have been claimed to be topic shifters, taking up a non-topical antecedent and promoting it to topichood. However, der can form topical referential chains, while dieser cannot. We operationalize discourse topichood via questions and provide evidence from a corpus study and an acceptability study that while dieser is indeed sensitive to topichood and avoids topical antecedents, der is compatible with topical antecedents. We hypothesize that only dieser is a discourse topic shifter, while der marks a sentence topic. To be published in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 46, preprint here: https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jJjM2I3N/
Project members: Sophie Repp & Heiko Seeliger (CRC 1252, A06)
The prosodic marking of information structure (IS) in German polar questions with an interrogative syntax has been observed to differ from that in assertions, which might be due to different final contours (falling, rising), different semantic-pragmatic restrictions, or a general inertness of questions to IS. In a production study, we investigated whether German declarative questions show similar deviations. We tested transitive structures where the object and the lexical verb were either both given, both new, or one was contrastive while the other was given, and found a strong adherence to default prosody across conditions (inertness). The association of contrast with high, and givenness with low, prosodic prominence familiar from assertions could be observed but it was modulated by speech-act-specific characteristics. Overall, there was substantial inter-individual variation. Link to the full article in the proceedings of ICPhS: https://guarant.cz/icphs2023/808.pdf
Project members: Clare Patterson, Petra B. Schumacher & Irina Sekerina (CRC 2152, C07)
Pronoun interpretation preferences are known to be hard to acquire in an L2. In German and Russian, both personal and demonstrative pronouns can refer to animate referents; demonstratives refer to less prominent referents, having a low subject-interpretation bias compared to personal pronouns in both languages. We measured the subject-bias for demonstrative versus personal pronouns in two offline referent-choice experiments using neutral, subject- and object-biasing verbs in German and Russian. Participants were bilingual L1-Russian–L2-German speakers with a wide range of AoA for German, as well as monolingual controls. Subject-bias varied according to the verb-type manipulation in all groups/languages. In the neutral verb condition in Russian, the preferences of the bilingual and control groups were similar, with a strong distinction in subject-bias between personal and demonstrative pronouns. In German, however, bilinguals did not distinguish between personal and demonstrative pronouns as strongly as the control group, a pattern which cannot be attributed to cross-linguistic influence from L1-Russian. Increasing proficiency resulted in a stronger distinction between pronoun types. This suggests that factors other than L1 similarity affect the acquisition of pronoun interpretation preferences. Posters on this study were presented at AMLaP 2023 and RUEG 2023
Project members: Derya Çokal & Klaus von Heusinger (CRC 1252, C04)
This study, employing eye-tracking reading and sentence completion experiments, explores the impact of competing antecedents on the demonstratives der and dieser in German. It challenges prior assumptions, revealing that in competitive alternative antecedent contexts, processing dieser initially posed challenges, indicating sensitivity to alternatives. Dieser exhibited less processing difficulties than der, potentially influenced by a register effect. Consistent with previous findings, in the offline task, references to the non-prominent entity were similar for both demonstratives, but our online experiment shows functional differences in cognitive processes between the two in reading. Our results suggest that Thematic Role accounts better explains antecedent preferences for der and dieser than Centering Theory. Poster presented at CORE Project 2024 Workshop Information theoretical perspectives on referring expression choice.
Project members: Timo Buchholz, Jet Hoek (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) & Klaus von Heusinger (CRC 1252, C04)
Recency affects how accessible referents are, but the effect of recency is me- diated by the structure of the discourse. In a series of four pronoun resolution experiments, we examine how the accessibility of referents is impacted by the form of subsequent discourse segments, investigating effects of syntactic subordination, the pres- ence of explicit coherence markers, and orthographic and prosodic boundaries. Our findings indicate that syntactic subordination, connectives, and orthographic boundaries all additively contribute to whether an intervening clause is perceived as less or more conceptually independent, and that this affects how strongly that clause blocks access to a preceding referent. However, the type of prosodic boundary was found to interact with syntax in an unforeseen way. Our results speak to the question of how the mental representation of a discourse is affected by the specific form of the discourse, and call for a reconsideration of intonational boundaries as integratedness cues.
Link: Preprint: https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/TQzYmIzZ/
Project members: Heiko Seeliger & Sophie Repp (CRC 1252, A06)
In German, contrastive narrow focus has been proposed to be marked with increased prosodic prominence of the accent on the focused expression compared to non-contrastive narrow focus. However, the manipulation of the focus structure of the target utterance involved a confounded manipulation of contrast and correction: Narrow non-contrastive focus was elicited in assertions (e.g., A: Was will Nina schneidern? B: Nina will BLUSEN schneidern), and contrastive focus in corrections (e.g., Will Nina Hosen schneidern? B: Nina will BLUSEN schneidern). Thus, it is unclear if the observed prominence increase is a result of contrast marking or of speech act marking. The present study aims to disentangle the effects of contrast and of speech act by investigating focus types in rejections only: If we find effects of contrast, contrast marking is not dependent on speech act marking. Results indicate that contrast marking is indeed independent of speech act marking. So-called verum focus ("Nina WILL Hosen schneidern") is also quite common in cases of pure polarity contrast (i.e. in the absence of lexical contrast).Link to the abstract at the 2nd Conference on Tone and Intonation: https://www.asianlp.sg/conferences/tai2023/proceedings/pdf/2023.tai-abstract.18.pdf
Project members: Maria Lialiou, Anna Bruggeman, Alexandra Vella, Sarah Grech, Petra B. Schumacher, & Martine Grice (CRC 1252 A01, Uni Bielefeld, Uni Malta)
This study investigates “stress deafness” in bilingual speakers of Maltese and Maltese English. Although both reportedly have lexical stress, the acoustic cues
to prominence appear to be relatively weak. Further, word-initial pitch peaks make pitch an unreliable cue to lexical stress, which can be elsewhere in the word.
In a sequence recall task, we show that speakers dominant in Maltese exhibit a classic “stress deafness” effect, similar to speakers of French. Speakers who identify as balanced or Maltese English dominant have more diverse results and do not show such a strong tendency towards “stress deafness”. These speakers may rely on their exposure to other varieties of English to identify (and recall) word prominences. This study suggests that the nature of stress in Maltese might need to be revisited. Link to the full article in the proceedings of ICPhS: https://guarant.cz/icphs2023/173.pdf
Project members: Project members: Timo Buchholz & Klaus von Heusinger (CRC 1252, C04)
We investigate the relationship between the discourse prominence of clauses
and that of individual arguments contained within them. In three pairs of parallel experiments on German, we manipulate the syntactic relation between two clauses (keeping the same discourse relation) and test for the effect on the prominence of a) individual subject referents and b) the clauses themselves. We claim that the syntactic structure of the two clauses is relevant for how the prominence of the individual referents is ‘inherited’ from the prominence at the clausal level. We show this on three types of discourse relations, backwards-looking causality vs. contrast vs. forward-looking causality, in order to demonstrate that prominence inheritance depends on syntactic structure, and not on discourse relations. Our results support our claims that prominence at the clausal level can be inherited by individual arguments. Partially presented at Xprag 2023: https://xpragx.sciencesconf.org/473400/document
Project members: Heiko Seeliger & Sophie Repp (CRC 1252, A06)
It is well-established for assertions that the information-structural status of referents influences prosodic prominence: givenness reduces and contrastive focus increases prominence. We present production data in German on the prosodic marking of givenness and contrast in comparison to newness in two non-assertive speech acts: polar exclamatives and polar questions. The results show that contrastive focus is consistently marked in both speech acts: through an increase of prosodic prominence on the contrastive element itself, and through a decrease of prominence of a word in the prenuclear region that in sentences without contrast typically is prominent. Givenness is not clearly marked prosodically in either speech act. We argue that givenness is necessary, but not sufficient for deaccentuation. First, if deaccentuation requires an accent shift (so that the intonation phrase is headed), the semantic-pragmatic effects of the shifted accent must fit the discourse context. We argue that there are subtle discourse conditions on accent shift in the questions involving VERUM focus, which prevent a shift. Second, deaccentuation is disfavored if speech act marking requires accentuation, as in exclamatives. Overall, the different functions of prosody show subtle interactions, which hint at a subordinate functional load of givenness marking but not of contrast marking. Link to the full article in the Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology: https://www.journal-labphon.org/article/id/6451/
Project members: Petra B. Schumacher, Hanna Weiland-Breckle, Guendalina Reul & Ingmar Brilmayer
Language users employ creative and innovative means to refer to novel concepts. One example is place-for-event metonymy as in “How many bands played at Woodstock?” where the place name is used to refer to an event. We capitalize on the observation that place-for-event metonymy can on the one hand result in the conventionali- zation of the event reading (as is the case for “Woodstock”) but on the other hand can also be relatively short- lived as a function of the socio-cultural or historical impact of the respective event (e.g., “Egypt” to refer to one of the sites of the Arab Spring). We use place-for-event metonymy as a test case to tap into discrete stages of conventionalization and compare the processing of the place and the event reading of particular expressions, with ratings of the degree of conventionalization as predictors. In an event-related potential (ERP) reading study, we observed a modulation of the Late Positivity between 500 and 750 ms post-onset by condition (event vs. place reading) and degree of conventionalization. The amplitude of the positivity was most pronounced for event readings with a low degree of conventionalization (similar to previous findings from ad-hoc metonymy). Interestingly, place readings with a high degree of (event) conventionalization also evoked a pronounced pos- itivity. The Late Positivity is viewed to reflect processing demands during reconceptualization required for proper utterance interpretation. Overall, the data suggest that stages of meaning evolution are reflected in the underlying neurophysiological processes.This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) as part of the XPrag.de project of the first author [project-ID 254822891] as well as a grant from the VolkswagenStiftung. Link to the full paper published in Cognition: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027723002329
Project members: Derya Çokal & Klaus von Heusinger (CRC 1252, C04)
German has two demonstrative pronouns: the der, die, das paradigm and the dieser, diese, dies(es) paradigm. Previous studies mainly compared the anaphoric use of der with the personal pronoun er and observed that der refers to less prominent antecedents, but there are only very few studies that investigate the differences between these two demonstrative pronouns. We hypothesize that they differ in signaling topic persistence and in accessing contrastive antecedents. We tested these hypotheses in short texts that manipulated the contrast of the antecedent by inducing the expression ‘in contrast to’ vs. ‘together with’ (e.g., the cellist in contrast to the flutist vs. the cellist together with the flutist). Results from our eye-tracking reading Experiment (Experiment 1), in which participants’ eye-movements were monitored while reading sentences, show that (i) readers preferred dieser when referring to the topic of a sentence, (ii) dieser caused less processing difficulties than der in both contrast and no-contrast contexts, and (iii) the processing of der in a contrastive context is faster than in a no-contrast context. Our sentence completion Experiment (Experiment 2) also confirmed that der and dieser are both used for anaphoric reference to a topical antecedent. Collectively, our experiments provide evidence that dieser functions as inducing topic persistence, and that contrast in the previous discourse influences the online processing of the German demonstrative der. These results suggest that there is a need for further experimental investigation into the semantic factors and informational structures influencing the usage of demonstrative pronouns in German. Posters were presented at at XPRAG 2023 & AMLaP 2023.
Project members: Umesh Patil, Stefan Hinterwimmer & Petra B. Schumacher (CRC 1252, C05 & C07)
A short discourse in German such as Peter will einen Benz kaufen. Der hat wohl zu viel Geld. (EN: ‘Peter wants to buy a Mercedes-Benz. He apparently has too much money.’), seems to make sense. But if we make a small change to it by replacing the demonstrative pronoun der with another demonstrative pronoun dieser -- Peter will einen Benz kaufen. Dieser hat wohl zu viel Geld. -- it suddenly sounds strange! What makes the first example comprehensible but not the second? We think the first one involves a subjective evaluation of Peter by a narrator which makes it easy for der to refer to Peter, but dieser is unaffected by such evaluation, so it refers to the car Benz and it makes the second discourse sound strange to German speakers (a car obviously cannot have too much money!). We ran two experiments to test if our claim holds water. For the results, check out the presentation "Evaluative expressions influence prominence: effects on die and diese pronouns" by Umesh Patil, Stefan Hinterwimmer and Petra B. Schumacher at the ICPL-III, 2022 (the abstract is here: https://sfb1252.uni-koeln.de/sites/sfb_1252/user_upload/ICPL3/Abstracts_ICPL3/Prominence-Conference-3_Patil_et._al..pdf).
Project members: Umesh Patil & Petra B. Schumacher (CRC 1252, C07)
How are prominence signals such as subjecthood and agenthood realized cognitively? How do German speakers use these signals while processing pronouns such as 'sie' or 'die'? We tried to explain the interaction between these signals through computational modeling. We converted various prominence signals into memory retrieval cues in a cognitive architecture of ACT-R, and tested if the model behaves similar to German speakers. Indeed it does! Check out our work at AMLaP-2022 (ZOOM link to the session: https://virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/#/event/3067/session/50866 and the abstract: https://virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/#/event/3067/submission/199). If you missed that, a shorter presentation (8 mins) from ICCM-2022 is available at: https://mathpsych.org/presentation/800. And if you want to know more details about the work, take a look at our paper at: https://osf.io/cr5pz/.
Project members: Sophie Repp & Heiko Seeliger (CRC 1252, A06)
This study investigates prosodic prominence in string-identical verb-first exclamatives and questions in German. It presents results from three production experiments comparing polar exclamatives/questions with different finite verbs [auxiliary, lexical verb (unergative)] and/or subjects (d-pronoun, full phrase) in order to explore the prominence-lending characteristics of various lexical, syntactic and semantic factors, which seem to be relevant for prosodic prominence in exclamations but not in other speech acts. The results show that clause-initial finite verbs are accented much more often in exclamatives than in questions, indicating that the C-position is an attractor for prosodic prominence in exclamatives. Furthermore, d-pronouns are accented very frequently in exclamatives but virtually never in polar questions. Given full subjects are also accented more often in exclamatives than in questions. With respect to verb type, the findings show that finite auxiliaries are only accented in exclamatives, but that lexical verbs are also accented in questions. Thus, the lexical verbs tested in this study may carry an accent irrespective of clause-initial or clause-final position and independently of speech act. While some of the findings can be explained by semantic-pragmatic factors, not all of them can. We suggest that exclamations have a prosodic constructional default, which is determined by the speech act type: it comprises a requirement for the accentuation of certain elements in the clause, a low speaking rate and a reduced sensitivity to information-structural requirements for low prosodic prominence. Link to the full article in Frontiers in Communication: https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2020.00053
Project members: Magdalena Repp & Petra B. Schumacher (CRC 1252, C07)
Studies on pronoun resolution have mostly utilized short texts consisting of a context and a target sentence. In the current study we presented participants with nine chapters of an audio book while recording their EEG to investigate the real-time resolution of personal and demonstrative pronouns in a more naturalistic setting. The annotation of the features of the pronouns and their antecedents registered a surprising pattern: demonstrative pronouns showed an interpretive preference for subject/agent antecedents, although they are described to have an anti-subject or anti-agent preference. Given the presence of perspectival centers in the audio book, this however confirmed proposals that demonstrative pronouns are sensitive to perspectival centers. The ERP results revealed a biphasic N400–Late Positivity pattern at posterior electrodes for the demonstrative pronoun relative to the personal pronoun, thereby confirming previous findings with highly controlled stimuli. We take the observed N400 for the demonstrative pronoun as an indication for more demanding processing costs that occur due to the relative unexpectedness of this referential expression. The Late Positivity is taken to reflect the consequences of attentional reorientation: since the demonstrative pronoun indicates a possible shift in the discourse structure, it induces updating of the discourse structure. In addition to the biphasic pattern, the data showed an enhanced positivity at frontal electrode sites for the demonstrative pronoun relative to the personal pronoun. We suggest that this frontal positivity reflects self-relevant engagement and identification with the perspective holder. Our study suggests that by using naturalistic stimuli, we get one step closer to understanding the implementation of language processing in the brain during real life language processing. Link to the paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frai.2023.1058554
Project members: Paul Compensis & Petra B. Schumacher
Differential object indexing (DOI) in Bulgarian is a special encoding strategy that is concerned with discourse management and primarily used to mark (perceived) deviances from expectations with respect to the status of referents in discourse. In this ERP experiment, we showed that the presence of DOI directly affects the discourse representations of the referents involved. Referential shifts to less prominent referents were associated with expectation violations and discourse updating, reflected in a N400 - LPS pattern. This study was presented at the 34th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (you can find a more detailed abstract here https://www.cuny2021.io/2021/02/24/114/). If you want to know more about the project results in general, see https://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/62893/.
Project members: Umesh Patil & Sol Lago
Do second language learners (L2) of German process German differently than German native speakers (L1)? Yes, they do! We can observe the differences in their eye movements during processing German possessive pronouns like "ihre/n". L2 speakers use the gender information slowly and less efficiently than L1 speakers. Interestingly, L2ers make the same mistakes as German L1ers. Can we explain the differences and similarities between L1 and L2 German speakers using a computational model of language processing? In Patil and Lago (2022), we propose two cognitive models of the real-time pronoun processing by L2ers. The models extend an earlier model of L1ers according to two central hypotheses of L2 sentence processing. We compare which model can explain the L1-L2 differences better. If you are interested in more details take a look at our presentation entitled "Computational cognitive modeling of predictive sentence processing in a second language" at this year's Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2022) or the preprint of our paper at: https://osf.io/rkuqz/
