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Comprehenders are known to generate expectations about upcoming linguistic input at the sentence and discourse level. However, most previous studies on prediction focused mainly on word-induced brain activity rather than examining neural activity preceding a critical stimulus in discourse processing, where prediction actually takes place. In this EEG study, participants were presented with multiple sentences resembling a discourse including conditional sentences with either only if or if, which are characterized by different semantics, triggering stronger or weaker predictions about the possible continuation of the presented discourses, respectively. Results revealed that discourses including only if, as compared to discourses with bare if, triggered an increased predictive neural activity before the expected critical word, resembling the readiness potential. Moreover, word-induced P300 brain responses were found to be enhanced by unpredictable discourse continuations and reduced in predictable discourse continuations. Intriguingly, brain responses preceding and following the critical word were found to be correlated, which yields evidence for predictive activity modulating word-induced processing on the discourse level. These findings shed light on the predictive nature of neural processes at the discourse level, critically advancing our understanding of the functional interconnection between discourse understanding and prediction processes in brain and mind.

Reading is a key skill for university students. The Author Recognition Test (ART) and the Title Recognition Test (TRT) have both been used for decades to measure print exposure which correlates with reading and other linguistic skills. Given the available evidence for interindividual differences in reading skills, this study addresses three open issues. First, to what extent do ART and TRT scores correlate with individual differences regarding students’ study programs? Second, how do these results correlate with the self-reported time spent reading different types of text genres (e.g., fiction, nonfiction) per week? And third, this study compares ART and TRT to one another. We tested students from six study programs in the humanities and (medical) sciences which vary in the amount and kind of reading material required for study success. We found that students perform significantly differently in the ART and the TRT depending on their field of study. Students in a study program focusing on fiction and literature perform best overall. We also replicated the well-known effect of age on ART and TRT scores: older students have better scores. We did not find reliable effects of reading time on test performance, whereas individual creative writing habits did positively predict ART/TRT test results. These results raise a number of important questions regarding the ART/TRT in general and regarding interindividual differences in personal reading and writing habits and the change in reading habits in times of media convergence.

The present article aims to show that the elicitation of intuitive literary-aesthetic sentence judgments taps into readers’ poetry-specific linguistic register, and how such judgment methods can be used to support and constrain future theory formation in experimental poetics. In two experiments, we examined effects of deviant and parallelistic linguistic features on readers’ grammatical and literary-aesthetic evaluation of single sentences. In Experiment 1, participants rated carefully selected and modified lines of German poetry for either acceptability or poeticity (n = 40 each) on a 7-point scale; original lines featured grammatical deviations that were absent in modified versions. All investigated deviation types reduced the acceptability of the lines, but only routine licenses of German poetry increased their perceived poeticity and showed moderate to strong correlations between poeticity and deviance (i.e., low acceptability). In Experiment 2, participants made forced acceptability (n = 120) or poeticity (n = 120) choices regarding two (out of four) syntactic variants of a single sentence; variants crossed syntactic canonicity (canonical/non-canonical) and sentence rhythm (alternating/non-alternating). Acceptability choices favored only canonical syntax; poeticity choices were sensitive to both variables, and favored non-canonical syntax and alternating sentence rhythms. Our results indicate that poeticity judgments reflect categorical and gradient genre-specific well-formedness (Exp. 1), and that poeticity criteria are similar for traditional verse and for regular sentences without salient genre cues (Exp. 2). The observed prosodic and grammatical preferences suggest that perceptual fluency and conceptual challenge are prototypical characteristics of poetry reading. We conclude that sentence judgments can reveal whether and to which degree specific features of linguistic structure contribute to poetic effects.

This dissertation examines the processes and mechanisms of language comprehension that characterise the reception of literary texts. It reports a series of experiments that use behavioural and electrophysiological measures to study the effects of readers' genre conceptions on the processing and evaluation of verbal stimuli. Focusing on different aspects and stages of literary reception, all of these experiments contrast poetry-specific processing and evaluation routines with routines appropriate for processing everyday language or prose texts, while strictly controlling for linguistic variables. Chapter 1 reports two experiments that employed sentence judgments (Experiment 1a) and event-related brain potentials (Experiment 1b) to investigate the influence of genre categorization (poetry vs. no categorization) on the evaluation and the online comprehension of single sentences. Specifically, we examined whether external genre categorization modulates the use of prosodic information in sentence reading and whether it affects the processing and the perceived meaningfulness of semantically (in)congruent utterances. The use of single sentences rather than entire texts allowed us to isolate a priori effects of genre categorization, i.e., processing adjustments triggered by the category and not by the (con)text. Chapter 2 presents additional analyses of the EEG data collected in Experiment 1b. Aiming to pin down the effects of genre categorization on anticipatory attentional states, these analyses (Experiment 1c) focused on pre-stimulus alpha power as an index of selective attention prior to the first linguistic input as well as on further early (<350ms) ERP effects of genre categorization. Chapter 3 reports a study that combined eye tracking and speech recordings (Experiment 2) to contrast the processing strategies for literary prose vs. poetry during oral text reading. Moving beyond aprioristic effects of genre categorization, this study specifically aimed to reveal genre-specific dynamics by studying the interaction of text category and (con)text during literary processing. Chapter 4 presents two experiments that used sentence judgments to examine the influence of morpho-syntactic and prosodic variables on the grammatical and literary-aesthetic evaluation of poetic verse (Experiment 3a) and of regular sentences (Experiment 3b). These studies aimed to demonstrate that experienced readers systematically associate the genre of poetry with selected grammatical structures and features. Chapter 5 summarizes the results of the presented experiments, relates them to distinct stages of the reception process, discusses some limitations of the present work and identifies possible directions for future research in literary psycholinguistics.

A constructicon, i.e., a structured inventory of constructions, essentially aims at documenting functions of lexical and grammatical constructions. Among other parameters, so-called constructional collo-profiles, as introduced by Herbst (2018, 2020), are conclusive for determining constructional meanings. They provide information on how relevant individual words are for construction slots, they hint at usage preferences of constructions and serve as a helpful indicator for semantic peculiarities of constructions. However, even though collo-profiles constitute an indispensable component of constructicon entries, they pose major challengers for constructicographers: For a constructicographic enterprise it is not feasible to conduct collostructional analyses for hundreds or even thousands of constructions. In this article, we introduce a procedure based on the large language model BERT that allows to predict collo-profiles without having to extensively annotate instances of constructions in a given corpus. Specifically, by discussing the constructions X macht Y ADJP (‘x makes Y ADJ’, e.g. he drives him crazy) and N1 PREP N1 (e.g., bumper to bumper, constructions over constructions), we show how the developed automated system generates collo-profiles based on a limited number of annotated instances. Finally, we place collo-profiles alongside other dimensions of constructional meanings included in the German Constructicon.