Refine
Document Type
- Part of a Book (5)
- Article (4)
- Conference Proceeding (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (11)
Keywords
- Experiment (11) (remove)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (5)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (5)
- Postprint (2)
- Ahead of Print (1)
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (7)
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (4)
Publisher
- Sage Publications (2)
- de Gruyter (2)
- Association for Computational Linguistics (1)
- Frontiers Media (1)
- Harrassowitz (1)
- Narr Francke Attempto (1)
- Pabst (1)
- Springer (1)
- Wilhelm Fink (1)
Comprehending conditional statements is fundamental for hypothetical reasoning about situations. However, the online comprehension of conditional statements containing different conditional connectives is still debated. We report two self-paced reading experiments on German conditionals presenting the conditional connectives wenn (‘if’) and nur wenn (‘only if’) in identical discourse contexts. In Experiment 1, participants read a conditional sentence followed by the confirmed antecedent p and the confirmed or negated consequent q. The final, critical sentence was presented word by word and contained a positive or negative quantifier (ein/kein ‘one/no’). Reading times of the two quantifiers did not differ between the two conditional connectives. In Experiment 2, presenting a negated antecedent, reading times for the critical positive quantifier (ein) did not differ between conditional connectives, while reading times for the negative quantifier (kein) were shorter for nur wenn than for wenn. The results show that comprehenders form distinct predictions about discourse continuations due to differences in the lexical semantics of the tested conditional connectives, shedding light on the role of conditional connectives in the online interpretation of conditionals in general.
Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition and predictability influence the articulation of the frequent German word “sie” [zi] (they). We find that articulatory variability is proportional to speaking rate and the duration of [zi], and that overall variability decreases as [zi] is repeated during the experiment. Lower variability is also observed as the conditional probability of [zi] increases, and the greatest reduction in variability occurs during the execution of the vocalic target of [i]. These results indicate that practice can produce observable differences in the articulation of even the most common gestures used in speech.
We introduce a novel scientific document processing task for making previously inaccessible information in printed paper documents available to automatic processing. We describe our data set of scanned documents and data records from the biological database SABIO-RK, provide a definition of the task, and report findings from preliminary experiments. Rigorous evaluation proved challenging due to lack of gold-standard data and a difficult notion of correctness. Qualitative inspection of results, however, showed the feasibility and usefulness of the task.
Wir stellen eine empirische Studie vor, die der Frage nachgeht, ob und in welchem Ausmaß Wörterbücher und andere lexikographische Ressourcen die Ergebnisse von Textüberarbeitungen verbessern. Studierende wurden in unserer Studie gebeten, zwei Texte zu optimieren und waren dabei zufällig in drei unterschiedliche Versuchsbedingungen eingeteilt: 1. ein Ausgangstext ohne Hinweise auf potenzielle Fehler im Text, 2. ein Ausgangstext, bei dem problematische Stellen im Text hervorgehoben waren und 3. ein Ausgangstext mit hervorgehobenen Problemstellen zusammen mit lexikographischen Ressourcen, die zur Lösung der spezifischen Probleme verwendet werden konnten. Wir fanden heraus, dass die Teilnehmer*innen der dritten Gruppe die meisten Probleme korrigierten und die wenigsten semantischen Verzerrungen während der Überarbeitung einführten. Außerdem waren sie am effizientesten (gemessen in verbesserten Textabschnitten pro Zeit). Wir berichten in dieser Fallstudie ausführlich vom Versuchsaufbau, der methodischen Durchführung der Studie und eventuellen Limitationen unserer Ergebnisse.
Die sprachliche Situation im Kanton Graubünden, wo eine Vielzahl von italienischen, romanischen und deutschen Varietäten in lang andauerndem Kontakt stehen, ist bisher nur wenig beschrieben, eine wahrnehmungslinguistische Untersuchung steht noch ganz aus. Ausgehend von der Annahme, dass Salienz abhängig vom eigenen sprachlichen System und vom Sprecherwissen ist, wurde ein Experiment konzipiert, bei dem Hörer aus Graubünden und Zürich Aufnahmen aus drei Bündner Orten, in denen Rätoromanisch und Deutsch in unterschiedlichen Kontaktverhältnissen stehen, hören und kommentieren sollten. Dabei konnte gezeigt werden, dass Bündner aufgrund ihres Sprecherwissens über die Variation in Graubünden andere Merkmale wahrgenommen und die Aufnahmen anders charakterisiert haben als Zürcher.
In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the relationship between the subject preference in the resolution of subject-object ambiguities in German embedded clauses and semantic word order constraints (i.e., prominence hierarchies relating to the specificity/referentiality of noun phrases, case assignment and thematic role assignment). Our central research question concerned the timecourse with which prominence information is used and particularly whether it modulates the subject preference. In both experiments, we replicated previous findings of reanalysis effects for object-initial structures. Our findings further suggest that noun phrase prominence does not alter initial parsing strategies (viz., the subject preference), but rather modulates the ease of later reanalysis processes. In Experiment 1, the object case assigned by the verb did not affect the ease of reanalysis. However, the syntactic reanalysis was rendered more difficult when the order of the two arguments violated the specificity/referentiality hierarchy. Experiment 2 revealed that the initial subject preference also holds for verbs favoring an object-initial base order (i.e., dative object-experiencer verbs). However, the advantage for subject-initial sentences is neutralized in relatively late processing stages when the thematic role hierarchy and the specificity hierarchy converge to promote scrambling.
In recent years, reading has become an increasingly digital experience. In addition to various subjective impressions about the quality of reading from digital media, e.g. that it is more effortful than reading conventional books, a number of more scientific questions arise at the interface of reading research and book studies. Here, we summarize several new insights on reading effort and reading behavior on digital media. Part one reviews a study in which 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. Older adults showed faster mean fixation durations and lower EEG theta band voltage density – known to covary with memory encoding and retrieval – when reading from a tablet computer in comparison to the other devices. Young adults showed comparable fixation durations and theta activity for all three devices. These results can be explained by better text discriminability (higher contrast) of the tablet computer. Older readers may benefit from this enhanced contrast because contrast sensitivity decreases with age. In the second part, we present an explorative study about the influence of font type and typographic alignment (flush left vs. justified) on reading from a tablet computer. Importantly, the eyes do not fall between – increasingly larger – spaces, as expected, but – to the contrary – use these spaces for planning an optimal fixation of the next word. In summary, the perspective presented here provides initial evidence about the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary research between experimental reading, neurocognition and book studies.
In diesem Beitrag werden nach einer kurzen methodischen Vorstellung der Elektroenzephalographie und der Ereignis-korrelierten Potenziale einige Eckpunkte, die bei der Gestaltung eines linguistischen EEG-Experimentes Beachtung finden sollten, ausgeführt. Der Beitrag schliest mit Überlegungen, die bei der Untersuchung grammatischer Variation besonders berücksichtigt werden sollten.