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The NottDeuYTSch corpus is a freely available collection of YouTube comments written under German-speaking videos by young people between 2008 and 2018. The article uses the NottDeuYTSch corpus to investigate how YouTube comments can be used to produce learning materials and how corpora of Digitally-Mediated Communication can benefit intermediate learners of German. The article details the effects of authentic communication within YouTube comments on teenage learners, examining how they can influence the psycholinguistic factors of motivation, foreign language anxiety, and willingness to communicate. The article also discusses the benefits and limitations of using authentic corpus material for the development of teaching material.
Prediction is a central mechanism in the human language processing architecture. The psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic literature has seen a lively debate about what form prediction may take and what status it has for language processing in the human mind and brain. While predictions are a ubiquitous finding, the implications of these results for models of language processing differ. For instance, eyetracking data suggest that predictions may rely on sublexical orthographic information in natural reading, while electrophysiological data provide mixed evidence for form-based predictions during reading. Other research has revealed that humans rapidly adapt to text specifics and that their predictive capacity varies, broadly speaking, in accordance with inter- and intra-individual language proficiency, which cuts across the speaker groups (e.g. L1 vs. L2 speakers, skilled vs. untrained readers) traditionally used for experimental contrasts. There is therefore evidence that the kind and strength of linguistic predictions depend on (at least) three sources of variability in language processing: speaker, text genre and experimental method.
The aim of this Research Topic is to develop a better understanding of prediction in light of the three sources of variability in language processing, by providing an overview of state-of-the art research on predictive language processing and by bringing together research from various disciplines.
First, intra-and inter-individual differences and their influence on predictive processes remain underrepresented in experimental research on predictive processing. How do language users differ in their predictive abilities and strategies, and how are these differences shaped by e.g. biological, social and cultural factors?
Second, while language users experience great stylistic diversity in their daily language exposure and use, the majority of language processing research still focuses on a very constrained register of well-controlled sentences composed in the standard language. How are predictions shaped by extra- and meta-linguistic context, such as register/genre or accent/speaker identity, and how may this influence the processing of experimental items in another language or text variety?
Third, the Research Topic invites contributions that make use of a multi-method approach, such as combined behavioral and electrophysiological measures or experimental methods combined with measures extracted from corpus data. What opportunities and challenges do we face when integrating multiple approaches to examine linguistic, experimental and individual differences in human predictive capacity?
We welcome contributions from all areas of empirical psycho- and neurolinguistics, but contributions must explicitly address variability and variation in language and language processing. Relevant topics include individual differences and the impact of genre, modality, register and language variety. Contributions that go beyond single word and single sentence paradigms are especially desirable. Experimental, corpus-based, meta-analytic and review papers, as well as theoretical/opinion pieces are welcome; however, papers of the latter type should support their arguments with substantial empirical evidence from the literature. Particularly desirable are contributions which combine topics and/or methods, such as the impact of an individual's native dialect on processing of constructions that show variability in the standard language (e.g. choice of auxiliary, agreement of mass nouns, etc.) or experimental methods combined with measures extracted from corpus data such as information-theoretic surprisal.
Neologisms, i.e., new words or meanings, are finding their way into everyday language use all the time. In the process, already existing elements of a language are recombined or linguistic material from other languages is borrowed. But are borrowed neologisms accepted similarly well by the speech community as neologisms that were formed from “native” material? We investigate this question based on neologisms in German. Building on the corresponding results of a corpus study, we test the hypothesis of whether “native” neologisms are more readily accepted than those borrowed from English. To do so, we use a psycholinguistic experimental paradigm that allows us to estimate the degree of uncertainty of the participants based on the mouse trajectories of their responses. Unexpectedly, our results suggest that the neologisms borrowed from English are accepted more frequently, more quickly, and more easily than the “native” ones. These effects, however, are restricted to people born after 1980, the so-called millenials. We propose potential explanations for this mismatch between corpus results and experimental data and argue, among other things, for a reinterpretation of previous corpus studies.
Handschrift ist ein alltägliches Phänomen – sie begegnet uns in der Schule, auf Einkaufszetteln oder auch als Unterschrift. Über die grammatischen und insbesondere die graphematischen Grundlagen der Handschrift wissen wir allerdings nur wenig. Dabei bieten Handschriften mehr Variationsmöglichkeiten als etwa Druckschriften und können deshalb mehr grammatische Strukturen sichtbar machen, als dies in gedruckten Texten der Fall ist.
Die vorliegende Untersuchung zeigt, dass strukturelle Eigenheiten einer Handschrift oft mit grammatischen Eigenheiten zusammenfallen, etwa durch die Markierung komplexer Grapheme, Silben-, Morphem- und Fußgrenzen oder auch durch die Auszeichnung bestimmter Buchstabenformen wie ‹e›, wenn es mit Schwa korrespondiert. Dazu werden Abituraufsätze untersucht, graphetisch und grammatisch annotiert und ausgewertet.
When humans have a conversation with one-another, they generally take turns speaking one after the other without overlapping each others talk or leaving silence between turns for long stretches of time. Previous research has shown that conversation is a structured practice following rules that help interlocutors to manage the flow of conversation interactively. While at the beginning of a conversation it remains open who will speak when about what and for how long, interlocutors regulate the flow of conversation as it unfolds. One basic set of rules that interlocutors operate with governs the allocation of speaking turns, with the central rule stating that whoever starts speaking first at a point in time when speaker change becomes relevant has the rights and obligations to produce the next turn. The organization of turn allocation, therefore, is one reason for conversational turn taking to be so remarkably fast, with the beginnings of turns most often being quite accurately aligned with the ends of the previous turns. Observations of this outstanding speed of turn taking gave rise to a number of questions concerning language processing in conversational situations. The studies presented in this thesis investigate some of these questions from the perspective of the current listener preparing to be the next speaker who will respond to the current turn.
The study presented in Chapter 2 investigates when next speakers begin to plan their own turn with respect to two points in time, (i) the moment when the incoming turn’s message becomes clear enough to make response planning possible and (ii) the moment when the incoming turn terminates. Results of previous studies were inconclusive about the timing of language planning in conversation, with evidence in favour of both late and early response planning. Furthermore, previous studies presented both evidence as well as counter evidence indicating that response planning depends or does not depend on an accurate prediction of the timing of the incoming turn’s end. The study presented here makes use of a novel experimental paradigm which includes a dialogic task that participants need to fulfil in response to critical utterances by a confederate. These critical utterances were structured, on the one hand, so that their message became clear either only at the end of the turn or before the end of the turn, and, on the other hand, so that it was either predictable or not predictable when exactly the turn would end. Participant’s eye-movements as well as their response latencies indicated that they always planned their next turn as early as possible, irrespective of the predictability of the incoming turn’s end. The presented results provide evidence in favour of models of turn taking that predict speech planning to happen in overlap with the incoming turn.
Having established that next speakers begin to plan their turn in overlap, the study presented in Chapter 3 goes more into detail investigating to which depth language planning progresses while the incoming turn is still unfolding. To this end, a number of psycholinguistic paradigms were combined. In the study’s main experiment, participants had to fulfil a switch-task in which they switched from picture naming in response to an auditorily presented question to making a lexical decision. By manipulating the relatedness of the word for lexical decision with the picture that was prepared to be named before the task-switch it was possible to draw inferences on which processing stages were entered during the speech production process in overlap with the incoming turn. Participants’ behavioural responses in the lexical decision task revealed that they entered the stage of phonological encoding while the incoming turn was still unfolding, showing that planning in overlap is not limited to conceptual preparation but includes all sub-processes of formulation.
Given that speech production regularly enters the stages of formulation in overlap with the incoming turn, as shown in Chapters 2 and 3, the question arises whether planning the next turn in overlap is cognitively more demanding than during the gap between turns. This question is approached in the study presented in Chapter 4 by measuring pupillometric responses of participants in a dialogic task. An increase in pupil diameter during a cognitive task is indicative of increased processing load, and pupillometric responses to planning in overlap with the incoming turn were found to be greater than responses to planning in the gap between turns. These results show that planning in overlap is more demanding than planning during the gap, even though it is highly practiced by speakers.
After Chapters 2 to 4 investigated the timing and mechanisms of speech planning in conversation, Chapter 5 turns towards the timing of articulation of a planned turn, asking the question what sources of information next speakers use to time the articulation of a planned utterance to start closely after the incoming turn comes to an end. In this Chapter’s study, participants taking turns with a confederate responded to utterances containing or not containing different cues to the location of the incoming turn’s end. Participants made use of lexical and turn-final intonational cues, but not of turn-initial intonational cues, responding faster when the relevant cues were present than when they were not present. These results show that the timing of turn initiation in next speakers depends on the recognition of the incoming turn’s point of completion and not merely on the progress in planning the next turn.
All evidence presented in Chapters 2 to 5 is summed up and bundled together in a cognitive model of turn taking, which is being presented in Chapter 6. This model assumes, centrally, that the planning of a turn and the timing of its articulation are separate cognitive processes that run in parallel in any next speaker during conversation. Planning generally starts as early as possible, often in overlap with the incoming turn, while the timing of articulation depends on the next speaker’s level of certainty that speaker change has become relevant at a particular moment, with a number of cues to the end of the incoming turn leading to an increase of certainty. Next turns are assumed to often be planned down to fully formulated utterance plans including their phonological form as early as possible on the basis of anticipations of the incoming turn’s message, which are created with the help of the general and situational knowledge about the world, the current speaker and her intentions, as well as the input that has been received so far. The level of certainty that speaker change becomes relevant rises or decreases as lexico-syntactic, prosodic, and pragmatic projections about the development of the current turn are fulfilled or not fulfilled. As the incoming turn progresses towards its end as was projected by the current listener, he becomes certain that speaker change becomes relevant and will initiate articulation of the prepared next turn. Viewing these two processes, planning a next turn and timing of its articulation, as separate makes it possible to explain the observable fast timing of turn taking while still modelling the allocation of turns as interactionally managed by interlocutors — a considerable advantage of the presented model compared to more traditional perspectives on turn taking and conversation.
The teaching slides accompany the following textbook:
Svenja Völkel & Franziska Kretzschmar (2021): Introducing linguistic research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The slides follow the structure of the book chapters and can be used for teaching in class. They include the basic information per chapter and exercises to work on in class or as homework. More detailed information, additional exercises, suggestions for research projects and recommendations for further reading can be found in the textbook.
Despite the importance of the agent role for language grammar and processing, its definition and features are still controversially discussed in the literature on semantic roles. Moreover, diagnostic tests to dissociate agentive from non-agentive roles are typically applied with qualitative introspection data. We investigated whether quantitative acceptability ratings obtained with a well-established agentivity test, the DO-cleft, provide evidence for the feature-based prototype account of (Dowty, David R. 1991. Thematic protoroles and argument selction. Language 67(3). 547-619) postulating that agentivity increases with the number of agentive features that a role subsumes. We used four different intransitive verb classes in German and collected acceptability judgements from non-expert native speakers of German. Our results show that sentence acceptability increases linearly with the number of agentive features and, hence, agentivity. Moreover, our findings confirm that sentience belongs to the group of proto-agent features. In summary, this suggests that a multidimensional account including a specific mechanism for role prototypicality (feature accumulation) successfully captures gradient acceptability clines. Quantitative acceptability estimates are a meaningful addition to linguistic theorizing.
A central question in psycholinguistics is how the human brain processes language in real time. To answer this question, the differences between auditory and visual processing have to be considered. The present dissertation examines the extent to which event-related potentials (ERPs) in the human electroencephalogram (EEG) interact with different modes of presentation during sentence comprehension. Besides the two classical modalities, auditory and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), the monitoring of readers’ eye movements was chosen as a new mode of presentation. Here, the temporal paradox between neuronal ERP effects and behavioral effects in the eye movement record were of particular interest. Specifically, by concurrently measuring ERPs and eye movements in natural reading, the dissertation aimed to shed light on the counterintuitive fact that difficulties in sentence comprehension arise earlier in eye movement measures than in the corresponding neuronal ERP effects. In contrast to RSVP and the auditory modality, reading offers a parafoveal preview of upcoming words (Rayner 1998), which enables the brain to process information of words before these are fixated for the first time (in foveal vision). When the word Gegenteil in example (1) below is fixated and processed, the brain concurrently processes some information of the upcoming parafoveal words von and weiß. (1) Schwarz ist das Gegenteil von weiß. (2) Schwarz […] blau. (3) Schwarz […] nett. The parafoveal preview mostly provides orthographic (word form) information, while semantic information is not conveyed (Inhoff & Starr 2004; White 2008). Whereas word form and lexical meaning are processed simultaneously with RSVP and auditory presentation, the parafoveal preview in natural reading allows for a temporal decoupling such that word forms are processed before meaning. This is one reason for the faster information uptake in reading. The present dissertation is the first to systematically investigate the influence of the parafoveal preview in sentence processing. Participants read sentences such as in (1)-(3), in which two adjectives were either antonyms (1), semantically related non-antonyms (2), or semantically unrelated non-antonyms (3). ERPs were computed for the last fixation before the target word (the sentence-final word in 1-3), which was assumed to capture parafoveal processing, and for the first fixation on the target, that should reflect foveal processing. The results were compared to two experiments using identical stimuli with auditory and RSVP presentation, and the parafoveal preview clearly led to different ERP results. While the RSVP and auditory presentations replicated the finding of a P300 to the second antonym in (1) (Kutas & Iragui 1998; Roehm et al. 2007), there was no P300 in response to antonyms at any fixation position in natural reading. However, the dissociation of parafoveal and foveal processing in reading also made it possible to disentangle different processes underlying the N400. There was a reduced parafoveal N400 for (1,2) compared with (3), which could be attributed to the preactivation of the word forms of the expected antonyms and of semantically related non-antonyms. In foveal vision, all non-antonyms (2,3) showed an enhanced N400 compared with (1) because they were unexpected and implausible in the sentence context. This dissociation between the preactivation of a word-form and the contextual fit of a word’s meaning is impossible with the other two modes of presentation, because orthographic and semantic information become available almost at the same time and are thus processed simultaneously. Furthermore, the parafoveal N400 effect was not accompanied by changes in the duration of the corresponding fixation, whereas the foveal N400 was. Similarly, with the concurrent measurement of ERPs and eye movements, the temporal paradox described above remained, as effects in the eye movement record preceded the neuronal ERP effects. Further support for these central findings came from two additional experiments that investigated different stimuli with concurrent ERP-eye tracking measures. Altogether, the experiments revealed that the previous findings on the language-related N400 can be replicated with natural reading, but they can also be differentiated qualitatively by virtue of the characteristics of natural reading. Although the behavioral and neuronal effects mirrored one another, not every neuronal effect necessarily translates into a behavioral output. Finally, even concurrent ERP-eye tracking measures cannot resolve the temporal paradox.
Although the N400 was originally discovered in a paradigm designed to elicit a P300 (Kutas and Hillyard, 1980), its relationship with the P300 and how both overlapping event-related potentials (ERPs) determine behavioral profiles is still elusive. Here we conducted an ERP (N = 20) and a multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) experiment (N = 16) on distinct participant samples using an antonym paradigm (The opposite of black is white/nice/yellow with acceptability judgment). We hypothesized that SAT profiles incorporate processes of task-related decision-making (P300) and stimulus-related expectation violation (N400). We replicated previous ERP results (Roehm et al., 2007): in the correct condition (white), the expected target elicits a P300, while both expectation violations engender an N400 [reduced for related (yellow) vs. unrelated targets (nice)]. Using multivariate Bayesian mixed-effects models, we modeled the P300 and N400 responses simultaneously and found that correlation between residuals and subject-level random effects of each response window was minimal, suggesting that the components are largely independent. For the SAT data, we found that antonyms and unrelated targets had a similar slope (rate of increase in accuracy over time) and an asymptote at ceiling, while related targets showed both a lower slope and a lower asymptote, reaching only approximately 80% accuracy. Using a GLMM-based approach (Davidson and Martin, 2013), we modeled these dynamics using response time and condition as predictors. Replacing the predictor for condition with the averaged P300 and N400 amplitudes from the ERP experiment, we achieved identical model performance. We then examined the piecewise contribution of the P300 and N400 amplitudes with partial effects (see Hohenstein and Kliegl, 2015). Unsurprisingly, the P300 amplitude was the strongest contributor to the SAT-curve in the antonym condition and the N400 was the strongest contributor in the unrelated condition. In brief, this is the first demonstration of how overlapping ERP responses in one sample of participants predict behavioral SAT profiles of another sample. The P300 and N400 reflect two independent but interacting processes and the competition between these processes is reflected differently in behavioral parameters of speed and accuracy.
In the rapidly changing circumstances of our increasingly digital world, reading is also becoming an increasingly digital experience: electronic books (e-books) are now outselling print books in the United States and the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, many readers still view e-books as less readable than print books. The present study thus used combined EEG and eyetracking measures in order to test whether reading from digital media requires higher cognitive effort than reading conventional books. Young and elderly adults read short texts on three different reading devices: a paper page, an e-reader and a tablet computer and answered comprehension questions about them while their eye movements and EEG were recorded. The results of a debriefing questionnaire replicated previous findings in that participants overwhelmingly chose the paper page over the two electronic devices as their preferred reading medium. Online measures, by contrast, showed shorter mean fixation durations and lower EEG theta band voltage density – known to covary with memory encoding and retrieval – for the older adults when reading from a tablet computer in comparison to the other two devices. Young adults showed comparable fixation durations and theta activity for all three devices. Comprehension accuracy did not differ across the three media for either group. We argue that these results can be explained in terms of the better text discriminability (higher contrast) produced by the backlit display of the tablet computer. Contrast sensitivity decreases with age and degraded contrast conditions lead to longer reading times, thus supporting the conclusion that older readers may benefit particularly from the enhanced contrast of the tablet. Our findings thus indicate that people’s subjective evaluation of digital reading media must be dissociated from the cognitive and neural effort expended in online information processing while reading from such devices.
We present an event-related potentials (ERP) study that addresses the question of how pieces of information pertaining to semantic roles and event structure interact with each other and with the verb’s meaning. Specifically, our study investigates German verb-final clauses with verbs of motion such as fliegen ‘fly’ and schweben ‘float, hover,’ which are indeterminate with respect to agentivity and event structure. Agentivity was tested by manipulating the animacy of the subject noun phrase and event structure by selecting a goal adverbial, which makes the event telic, or a locative adverbial, which leads to an atelic reading. On the clause-initial subject, inanimates evoked an N400 effect vis-à-vis animates. On the adverbial phrase in the atelic (locative) condition, inanimates showed an N400 in comparison to animates. The telic (goal) condition exhibited a similar amplitude like the inanimate-atelic condition. Finally, at the verbal lexeme, the inanimate condition elicited an N400 effect against the animate condition in the telic (goal) contexts. In the atelic (locative) condition, items with animates evoked an N400 effect compared to inanimates. The combined set of findings suggest that clause-initial animacy is not sufficient for agent identification in German, which seems to be completed only at the verbal lexeme in our experiment. Here non-agents (inanimates) changing their location in a goal-directed way and agents (animates) lacking this property are dispreferred and this challenges the assumption that change of (locational) state is generally a defining characteristic of the patient role. Besides this main finding that sheds new light on role prototypicality, our data seem to indicate effects that, in our view, are related to complexity, i.e., minimality. Inanimate subjects or goal arguments increase processing costs since they have role or event structure restrictions that animate subjects or locative modifiers lack.
Hierarchical predictive coding has been identified as a possible unifying principle of brain function, and recent work in cognitive neuroscience has examined how it may be affected by age–related changes. Using language comprehension as a test case, the present study aimed to dissociate age-related changes in prediction generation versus internal model adaptation following a prediction error. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured in a group of older adults (60–81 years; n = 40) as they read sentences of the form “The opposite of black is white/yellow/nice.” Replicating previous work in young adults, results showed a target-related P300 for the expected antonym (“white”; an effect assumed to reflect a prediction match), and a graded N400 effect for the two incongruous conditions (i.e. a larger N400 amplitude for the incongruous continuation not related to the expected antonym, “nice,” versus the incongruous associated condition, “yellow”). These effects were followed by a late positivity, again with a larger amplitude in the incongruous non-associated versus incongruous associated condition. Analyses using linear mixed-effects models showed that the target-related P300 effect and the N400 effect for the incongruous non-associated condition were both modulated by age, thus suggesting that age-related changes affect both prediction generation and model adaptation. However, effects of age were outweighed by the interindividual variability of ERP responses, as reflected in the high proportion of variance captured by the inclusion of by-condition random slopes for participants and items. We thus argue that – at both a neurophysiological and a functional level – the notion of general differences between language processing in young and older adults may only be of limited use, and that future research should seek to better understand the causes of interindividual variability in the ERP responses of older adults and its relation to cognitive performance.
Kommunikation und Emotion
(1991)