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This study investigated whether an analysis of narrative style (word use and cross-clausal syntax) of patients with symptoms of generalised anxiety and depression disorders can help predict the likelihood of successful participation in guided self-help. Texts by 97 people who had made contact with a primary care mental health service were analysed. Outcome measures were completion of the guided self-help programme, and change in symptoms assessed by a standardised scale (CORE-OM). Regression analyses indicated that some aspects of participants' syntax helped to predict completion of the programme, and that aspects of syntax and word use helped to predict improvement of symptoms. Participants using non-finite complement clauses with above-average frequency were four times more likely to complete the programme (95% confidence interval 1.4 to 11.7) than other participants. Among those who completed, the use of causation words and complex syntax (adverbial clauses) predicted improvement, accounting for 50% of the variation in well-being benefit. These results suggest that the analysis of narrative style can provide useful information for assessing the likelihood of success of individuals participating in a mental health guided self-help programme.
Discourse metaphors
(2008)
The article introduces the notion of discourse metaphor, relatively stable metaphorical mappings that function as a key framing device within a particular discourse over a certain period of time. Discourse metaphors are illustrated by case studies from three lines of research: on the cultural imprint of metaphors, on the negotiation of metaphors and on cross-linguistic occurrence. The source concepts of discourse metaphors refer to phenomenologically salient real or fictitious objects that are part of interactional space (i.e., can be pointed at, like MACHINES or HOUSES) and/or occupy an important place in cultural imagination. Discourse metaphors change both over time and across the discourses where they are used. The implications of focussing on different types of source domains for our thinking about the embodiment and sociocultural situatedness of metaphor is discussed, with particular reference to recent developments in Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Research on discourse suggests that situatedness is a crucial factor in the functioning and dynamics of metaphor.
Psychological research has emphasized the importance of narrative for a person’s sense of self. Building a coherent narrative of past events is one objective of psychotherapy. However, in guided self-help therapy the patient has to develop this narrative autonomously. Identifying patients’ narrative skills in relation to psychological distress could provide useful information about their suitability for self-help. The aim of this study was to explore whether the syntactic integration of clauses into narrative in texts written by prospective psychotherapy patients was related to mild to moderate psychological distress. Cross-clausal syntax of texts by 97 people who had contacted a primary care mental health service was analyzed. Severity of symptoms associated with mental health difficulties was assessed by a standardized scale (Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation outcome measure). Cross-clausal syntactic integration was negatively correlated with the severity of symptoms. A multiple regression analysis confirmed that the use of simple sentences, finite complement clauses, and coordinated clauses was associated with symptoms (R2 = .26). The results suggest that the analysis of cross-clausal syntax can provide information on patients’ narrative skills in relation to distressing events and can therefore provide additional information to support treatment decisions.
Cognitive linguists have long been interested in analogies people habitually use in thinking and speaking, but little is known about the nature of the relationship between verbal behaviour and such analogical schemas. This article proposes that discourse metaphors are an important link between the two. Discourse metaphors are verbal expressions containing a construction that evokes an analogy negotiated in the discourse community. Results of an analysis of metaphors in a corpus of newspaper texts support the prediction that regular analogies are form-specific, i.e., bound to particular lexical items. Implications of these results for assumptions about the generality of habitual analogies are discussed.
This article discusses possibilities for an elaboration of cognitive linguistic metaphor theory that takes into account the sociocultural situatedness of language and cognition. The approach of the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin, linking anthropological with cognitive perspectives on language, is introduced. The objectives of the article are i) to introduce this line of research, well-known in linguistics in Eastern Europe, but little known in the “Western”, English speaking scientific discourse; ii) to illustrate the usefulness of particular ideas within this approach for metaphor analysis in a corpus study of the metaphorical understanding of system transformation in German public discourse in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and iii) to discuss diverging elaborations of the notion of experience in cognitive linguistics, contrasting the Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin with Conceptual Metaphor Theory.
Punkt widzenia (lub angielski odpowiednik point of view) to ważne pojęcie we współczesnej lingwistyce kognitywnej. W artykule tym argumentuję, że pojęcie to jest obecnie używane do oznaczenia jakościowo różnych zjawisk: punktów widzenia utrwalonych na poziomie systemu oraz punktu widzenia mówiącego. Przedstawiam przykłady dla każdego z tych poziomów. Na zakończenie jest podjęta eksplikacja podobieństw i różnic pomiędzy tymi dwoma zastosowaniami pojęcia punkt widzenia. Taka eksplikacja wydaje mi się ważna dla jasności teoretycznych narzędzi lingwistyki kognitywnej.
‘Linguistic relativity’ has become a major keyword in debates on the psychological significance of language diversity. In this context, the term ‘relativity’ was originally taken on loan from Einstein’s then-recent theories by Edward Sapir (1924) and Benjamin L. Whorf (1940). The present paper assesses how far the idea of linguistic relativity does analogically build on relevant insights in modern physics, and fails to find any substantial analogies. The term was used rhetorically by Sapir and Whorf, and has since been incorporated into a cognitivist research programme that seeks to answer whether ‘language influences thought’. Contemporary research on ‘linguistic relativity’ has developed into a distinct way of studying language diversity, which shares a lot with the universalistic cognitivist framework it opposes, but little with relational approaches in science.
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.
Much language-related research in cognitive robotics appeals to usage-based models of language as proposed in cognitive linguistics and developmental psychology [1, 2] that emphasise the significance of learning, embodiment and general cognitive development for human language acquisition. Over and above these issues, however, what takes centre stage in these theories are social-cognitive skills of “intention-reading” that are seen as “primary in the language acquisition process” [1] – and also as difficult to incorporate into computational models of language acquisition. The present paper addresses these concerns: we describe work in progress on a series of experiments that take steps towards closing the gap between ‘solipsistic’ symbol grounding in individual robotic agents and socially framed embodied language acquisition in learners that attend to common ground [3] with changing interlocutors.
Co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction mutually scaffold and support each other within a virtuous feedback cycle in the development of human language in children. Within this framework, the purpose of this article is to bring together diverse but complementary accounts of research methods that jointly contribute to our understanding of cognitive development and in particular, language acquisition in robots. Thus, we include research pertaining to developmental robotics, cognitive science, psychology, linguistics and neuroscience, as well as practical computer science and engineering. The different studies are not at this stage all connected into a cohesive whole; rather, they are presented to illuminate the need for multiple different approaches that complement each other in the pursuit of understanding cognitive development in robots. Extensive experiments involving the humanoid robot iCub are reported, while human learning relevant to developmental robotics has also contributed useful results.
Disparate approaches are brought together via common underlying design principles. Without claiming to model human language acquisition directly, we are nonetheless inspired by analogous development in humans and consequently, our investigations include the parallel co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction. Though these different approaches need to ultimately be integrated into a coherent, unified body of knowledge, progress is currently also being made by pursuing individual methods.
In spite of the obvious importance that is accorded to the notion grammatical construction in any approach that sees itself as a construction grammar (CxG), there is as yet no generally accepted definition of the term across different variants of the framework. In particular, there are different assumptions about which additional requirements a given structure has to meet in order to be recognized as a construction besides being a ‘form-meaning pair’. Since the choice of a particular definition will determine the range of both relevant phenomena and concrete observations to be considered in empirical research within the framework, the issue is not just a mere terminological quibble but has important methodological repercussions especially for quantitative research in areas such as corpus linguistics. The present study illustrates some problems in identifying and delimiting such patterns in naturally occurring text and presents arguments for a usage-based interpretation of the term grammatical construction.
We taught a humanoid robot a number of different actions involving a number of different objects (e.g., touching a green object, moving a red object etc.) alongside a number of simplified linguistic labels for these behaviours (e.g., ‘touch-green’, ‘move-red’ etc.). The robot managed to learn the associations between the behaviours and their linguistic labels, and it succeeded in recognising the compositional structure of the behaviours and their associated linguistic descriptions (ACTION/VERB+OBJECT/NOUN). Moreover, it was able to generalise the learned instructions to novel, previously untrained action+object-combinations (e.g., touch-red). This corresponds to the task of learning and decomposing so-called ‘holophrases’ in early child language acquisition.
Research on syntactic ambiguity resolution in language comprehension has shown that subjects' processing decisions are influenced by a variety of heterogeneous factors such as e.g., syntactic complexity, semantic fit and the discourse frequency of the competing structures. The present paper investigates a further potentially relevant factor in such processes: effects of syntagmatic lexical chunking (or matching to a complex memorized prefab) whose occurrence would be predicted from usage-based assumptions about linguistic categorisation. Focusing on the widely studied so-called DO/SC-ambiguity in which a post-verbal NP is syntactically ambiguous between a direct object and the subject of an embedded clause, potentially biasing collocational chunks of the relevant type are identified in a number of corpus-linguistic pretests and then investigated in a self-paced reading experiment. The results show a significant increase in processing difficulty from a collocationally neutral over a lexically biasing to a strongly biasing condition. This suggests that syntagmatically complex and partially schematic templates of the kind envisioned in usage-based Construction Grammar may impinge on speakers' online processing decisions during sentence comprehension.
Introduction
(2008)
High word frequency and neighborhood density contribute to the accuracy and speed of word production in English adults (e.g., Vitevitch & Sommers 2003), and characterize early words in child English (e.g., Storkel 2004). The present study investigated a speech corpus of child German (ages 2;00-3;00) to further the understanding of the influence of frequency and density on production. Results for four children suggest that, contrary to English, words produced early are not from denser neighborhoods in an adult lexicon than later words. As in English, frequent words are produced before less frequent words. Implications on theory and methodology are discussed.
Reading corpora are text collections that are enriched with processing data. From a corpus linguist’s perspective, they can be seen as an extension of classical linguistic corpora with human language processing behavior. From a psycholinguist’s perspective, reading corpora allow to test psycholinguistic hypotheses on subsets of language and language processing as it is ‘in the wild’ – in contrast to strictly controlled language material in isolated sentences, as used in most psycholinguistic experiments. In this paper, we will investigate a relevance-based account of language processing which states that linguistic structures, that are embedded deeper syntactically, are read faster because readers allocate less attention to these structures.
The author presents a study using eye-tracking-while-reading data from participants reading German jurisdictional texts. I am particularly interested in nominalisations. It can be shown that nominalisations are read significantly longer than other nouns and that this effect is quite strong. Furthermore, the results suggest that nouns are read faster in reformulated texts. In the reformulations, nominalisations were transformed into verbal structures. Reformulations did not lead to increased processing times of verbal constructions but reformulated texts were read faster overall. Where appropriate, results are compared to a previous study of Hansen et al. (2006) using the same texts but other methodology and statistical analysis.
This replication study aims to investigate a potential bias toward addition in the German language, building upon previous findings of Winter and colleagues who identified a similar bias in English. Our results confirm a bias in word frequencies and binomial expressions, aligning with these previous findings. However, the analysis of distributional semantics based on word vectors did not yield consistent results for German. Furthermore, our study emphasizes the crucial role of selecting appropriate translational equivalents, highlighting the significance of considering language-specific factors when testing for such biases for languages other than English.
Sprachentwicklungstest zum Kasus bei den bilingualen Vorschulkindern: Sprachstand Russisch (KT-RUS)
(2020)
Several studies have examined effects of explicit task demands on eye movements in reading. However, there is relatively little prior research investigating the influence of implicit processing demands. In this study, processing demands were manipulated by means of a between-subject manipulation of comprehension question difficulty. Consistent with previous results from Wotschack and Kliegl, the question difficulty manipulation influenced the probability of regressing from late in sentences and re-reading earlier regions; readers who expected difficult comprehension questions were more likely to re-read. However, this manipulation had no reliable influence on eye movements during first-pass reading of earlier sentence regions. Moreover, for the subset of sentences that contained a plausibility manipulation, the disruption induced by implausibility was not modulated by the question manipulation. We interpret these results as suggesting that comprehension demands influence reading behavior primarily by modulating a criterion for comprehension that readers apply after completing first-pass processing.
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.
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.
Ancient Chinese poetry is constituted by structured language that deviates from ordinary language usage; its poetic genres impose unique combinatory constraints on linguistic elements. How does the constrained poetic structure facilitate speech segmentation when common linguistic and statistical cues are unreliable to listeners in poems? We generated artificial Jueju, which arguably has the most constrained structure in ancient Chinese poetry, and presented each poem twice as an isochronous sequence of syllables to native Mandarin speakers while conducting magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. We found that listeners deployed their prior knowledge of Jueju to build the line structure and to establish the conceptual flow of Jueju. Unprecedentedly, we found a phase precession phenomenon indicating predictive processes of speech segmentation—the neural phase advanced faster after listeners acquired knowledge of incoming speech. The statistical co-occurrence of monosyllabic words in Jueju negatively correlated with speech segmentation, which provides an alternative perspective on how statistical cues facilitate speech segmentation. Our findings suggest that constrained poetic structures serve as a temporal map for listeners to group speech contents and to predict incoming speech signals. Listeners can parse speech streams by using not only grammatical and statistical cues but also their prior knowledge of the form of language.
Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über den aktuellen Stand der Forschung zum Textverstehen aus psycholinguistischer Sicht. Zunächst wird kurz auf die Entwicklung der Psycholinguistik hin zu einer kognitiven und kommunikativ orientierten Sprachwissenschaft eingegangen. Anschließend werden die wichtigsten konzeptuellen, theoretischen und methodologischen Grundlagen der Textverstehensforschung vorgestellt. Wichtige semantische Verarbeitungseinheiten des Textverstehens sind die mentalen Propositionen sowie die mentalen Modelle. Die aktuelle Forschung zeigt, dass diese Einheiten nicht getrennt voneinander gesehen werden dürfen, sondern eng aufeinander bezogen sind. Auf der semantischen Ebene des Textverstehens spielen sich Prozesse der Referenz, der Kohärenz und der Inferenzbildung ab, die nicht nur vom Text, sondern auch vom Wissen und von den Interessen der Textrezipienten sowie von der Kommunikationssituation beeinflusst werden. Die aktuellen psycholinguistischen Theorien bilden Ausschnitte dieser komplexen Interaktion mit formalen Methoden ab. Nach einem kurzen Hinweis auf die psycholinguistische Forschung zur Ontogenese des Textverstehens werden Perspektiven für die Anwendung der Theorien auf praktische Fragestellungen wie die der Textverständlichkeit, der Förderung der Textkompetenz sowie der maschinellen Sprachverarbeitung aufgezeigt.
When time is not space
(2011)
It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this assumption on the basis of our research on the Amondawa (Tupi Kawahib)language and culture of Amazonia. Using both observational data and structured field linguistic tasks, we show that linguistic space-time mapping at theconstructional level is not a feature of the Amondawa language, and is not employed by Amondawa speakers (when speaking Amondawa). Amondawa does not recruit its extensive inventory of terms and constructions for spatial motion and location to express temporal relations. Amondawa also lacks a numerically based calendric system. To account for these data, and in opposition to a Universal Space-Time Mapping Hypothesis, we propose a Mediated Mapping Hypothesis, which accords causal importance to the numerical and artefact-based construction of time-based (as opposed to event-based) time interval systems.
Den traditionellen Konzeptualisierungen von EMOTION (als einem für die Erklärung der menschlichen Kognition irrelevanten Phänomenkomplex) wird ein integrativer Ansatz gegenübergestellt, demzufolge Kognition und Emotion als zwei mentale Systeme interagieren und sowohl repräsentational als auch prozedural relevante Schnittstellen haben. Emotionen werden als Kenntnis- und Bewertungssysteme, Gefühle als kognitiv erfahrbare Emotionen, definiert. Es wird anhand exemplarischer Beispiele erörtert, inwiefern kognitive Gedanken und emotionale Gefühle (entgegen der vorherrschenden Auffassung) mehr Gemeinsamkeiten als Unterschiede aufweisen.
Was halten die Deutschen von ihrer Muttersprache? Wie denken sie über andere Sprachen und deutsche Dialekte (siehe auch Schoel / Stahlberg in diesem Band)? Wie nehmen sie Veränderungen ihrer Sprache wahr und was halten sie von fremdsprachlichen Einflüssen, wie z. B. der Verwendung von Anglizismen? Sind Deutsche, umgekehrt betrachtet, besonders kritisch, wenn andere Deutsche Englisch sprechen? Und wie bewerten sie andere Personen, die z.B. einen französischen oder russischen Akzent im Deutschen besitzen? Mit all diesen Fragen hat sich das vorliegende Teilprojekt im Rahmen dieses von der Volkswagenstiftung geförderten Forschungsprojekts beschäftigt. Ausgehend von sozialpsychologischen Theorien und Methoden, wurden Spracheinstellungen in Deutschland näher untersucht.
Die Alltagsvorstellungen zum Textverstehen werden einer kritischen Analyse unterzogen. Texte enthalten demnach keine Bedeutungen, sondern sind Auslöser für einen Prozess der Konstruktion multipler mentaler Repräsentationen, vor allem einer Oberflächenrepräsentation, einer propositionalen Repräsentation und eines mentalen Modells. Der Text dient als Datenbasis für die Modellkonstruktion, für die Modellevaluation und ggf. für die Modellrevision. Die Konstruktion mentaler Modelle und der hierarchieniedrigeren mentalen Repräsentationen ist ein Prozess der Kohärenzbildung, der auch auf unterschiedlichen thematischen Ebenen stattfinden kann. Je nachdem, auf wie viel Ebenen ein Themenwechsel stattfindet, ist der thematische Aufbau eines Texts an bestimmten Stellen kontinuierlich und an anderen Stellen diskontinuierlich. Je diskontinuierlicher der Textaufbau, desto schwieriger wird für den Leser der Prozess der Fokus-Nachführung, mit dem der Leser dem Autor folgt. Die bei einem Themenwechsel erforderliche Suche nach dem neu fokussierten Referenten wird durch die Topic-Information bzw. durch die von ihr getragenen Suchparameter gesteuert. Außerdem erhält der Leser Hinweise darauf, ob eine Information für ihn neu oder ihm bereits bekannt ist. Hinsichtlich der weiteren Forschung wird für eine stärkere interdisziplinäre Zusammenarbeit plädiert.
Older adults are often exposed to elderspeak, a specialized speech register linked with negative outcomes. However, previous research has mainly been conducted in nursing homes without considering multiple contextual conditions. Based on a novel contextually-driven framework, we examined elderspeak in an acute general versus geriatric German hospital setting. Individuallevel information such as cognitive impairment (CI) and audio-recorded data from care interactions between 105 older patients (M = 83.2 years; 49% with severe CI) and 34 registered nurses (M = 38.9 years) were assessed. Psycholinguistic analyses were based on manual coding (k = .85 to k = .97) and computer-assisted procedures. First, diminutives (61%), collective pronouns (70%), and tag questions (97%) were detected. Second, patients’ functional impairment emerged as an important factor for elderspeak. Our study suggests that functional impairment may be a more salient trigger of stereotype activation than CI and that elderspeak deserves more attention in acute hospital settings.
Dieser Beitrag liefert eine Skizze eines gebrauchsbasierten integrativen soziokognitiven Modells des dynamischen Lexikons. Das Modell besteht aus drei Kernkomponenten: Handlungen in der aktuellen Sprachverwendung, kognitiven Prozessen und sozialen Prozessen. Die Komponenten des Modells werden zunächst einzeln beschrieben und dann zusammengefügt. Es wird gezeigt und anhand von zwei Beispielen illustriert, wie das Modell durch die systematische Beschreibung der Interaktion zwischen diesen Komponenten gleichzeitig Stabilität und Struktur sowie Variation und Wandel im Lexikon vorhersagt.
The present research unites two emergent trends in the area of language attitudes: (a) research on perceptions of nonnative speakers by nonnative listeners and (b) the search for general, basic mechanisms underlying the evaluation of nonnative accented speakers. In three experiments featuring an employment situation, German participants listened to a presentation given in English by a German speaker with a strong versus native-like accent (in Studies 1–3) versus a native speaker of English (in Study 1). They evaluated candidates with a strong accent worse than candidates with a native(-like) pronunciation—even to the degree that the quality of arguments was of no relevance (Study 1). Study 2 introduces an effective intervention to reduce these discriminatory tendencies. Across studies, affect and competence emerged as major mediators of hirability evaluations. Study 3 further revealed sequential indirect influences, which advance our understanding of previous inconsistent findings regarding disfluency and warmth perceptions.
Nonnative-accented speakers face prevalent discrimination. The assumption that people freely express negative sentiments toward nonnative speakers has also guided common research methods. However, recent studies did not consistently find downgrading, so that prejudice against nonnative accents might even be questioned at first sight. The present theoretical article will bridge these contradictory findings in three ways: (a) We illustrate that nonnative speakers with foreign accents frequently may not be downgraded in commonly used first-impression and employment scenario paradigms. It appears that relatively controlled responding may be influenced by norms and motivations to respond without prejudice, whereas negative biases emerge in spontaneous responding. (b) We present an integrative view based on knowledge on modern forms of prejudice to develop modern notions of accent-ism, which allow for predictions when accent biases are (not) likely to surface. (c) We conclude with implications for interventions and a tailored research agenda.
Nonnative accents are prevalent in our globalized world and constitute highly salient cues in social perception. Whereas previous literature has commonly assumed that they cue specific social group stereotypes, we propose that nonnative accents generally trigger spontaneous negatively biased associations (due to a general nonnative accent category and perceptual influences). Accordingly, Study 1 demonstrates negative biases with conceptual IATs, targeting the general concepts of accent versus native speech, on the dimensions affect, trust, and competence, but not on sociability. Study 2 attests to negative, largely enhanced biases on all dimensions with auditory IATs comprising matched native–nonnative speaker pairs for four accent types. Biases emerged irrespective of the accent types that differed in attractiveness, recognizability of origin, and origin-linked national associations. Study 3 replicates general IAT biases with an affect IAT and a conventional evaluative IAT. These findings corroborate our hypotheses and assist in understanding general negativity toward nonnative accents.
Interindividuelle Unterschiede bei der Verarbeitung sprachlicher Strukturen haben bei experimentellen Untersuchungen zur Sprachverarbeitung mittels neurobasierter Verfahren lange Zeit keine oder bestenfalls eine untergeordnete Rolle gespielt. Während individuelle Verarbeitungsstrategien in Abhängigkeit von experimentellen Faktoren (z.B. Aufgabenstellung) relativ gut belegt sind (z.B. probandenspezifisches strategisches Verhalten bei der Verarbeitung von semantischen Relationen; Roehm et al. 2007), wurde der Einfluss von Variation in der Grammatik des Standarddeutschen in Korrelation zu Hirnprozessen bisher kaum berücksichtigt. In diesem Beitrag werde ich auf der Basis dreier EEG-Experimente aus unterschiedlichen Bereichen (Synästhesie, semantische Relationen, Auxiliarselektion bei intransitiven Verben) Beispiele für Verarbeitungskorrelate interindividueller Variation vorstellen und diskutieren.
When collecting linguistic data using translation tasks, stimuli can be presented in written or in oral form. In doing so, there is a possibility that a systematic source of error can occur that can be traced back to the selected survey method and which can influence the results of the translation tasks. This contribution investigates whether and to what extent both of the aforementioned survey methods result in divergent results when using translation tasks. For this investigation, 128 informants provided linguistic data; each informant had to translate 25 Wenker sentences from Standard German into either East Swabian, Lechrain or West Central Bavarian dialect, as the case may be. The results show two tendencies. First, written stimuli lead to a slightly higher number of dialectal translation in segmental variables. Second, when oral stimuli are used, syntactic and lexical variables are translated significantly more often in such a manner that they diverge from the template. The results can be explained in terms of varying cognitive processing operations and the constraints of human working memory. When collecting data in the future, these tendencies should be taken into account.
Benefactive construction
(2013)
Semantic verb class
(2013)
Linking rule
(2013)
Verb preposition combination
(2013)
Verb group
(2013)
Noun phrase construction
(2013)
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.
Ist unser Denken und somit die Weltsicht für alle Menschen gleich oder sprachspezifisch? Auf diese uralte Fragestellung, der bereits Wilhelm von Humboldt nachgegangen ist, gibt dieses Buch eine eindeutig bejahende Antwort: Unsere Weltanschauung wird durch die Grammatik der eigenen Muttersprache(n) geprägt, sodass Menschen Ereignisse sprachspezifisch wahrnehmen, versprachlichen und auch erinnern. Diese grundlegenden Erkenntnisse sind durch den hier gewählten experimentellen Zugang psycholinguistischer Methoden (z.B. Eye-Tracking) erstmalig möglich. Der Einfluss von Sprache auf Kognition erweist sich darüber hinaus für Sprachkontakt als extrem relevant. Infolge des über Jahrhunderte andauernden Sprachkontakts zwischen dem Deutschen und Tschechischen hat sich das Aspekt-System des Tschechischen dahingehend geändert, dass die Ereigniskonzeptualisierung im Tschechischen wie im Deutschen verläuft und das Tschechische sich systematisch von anderen ost- und westslawischen Sprachen absetzt.
Poetic diction routinely involves two complementary classes of features: (i) parallelisms, i.e. repetitive patterns (rhyme, metre, alliteration, etc.) that enhance the predictability of upcoming words, and (ii) poetic deviations that challenge standard expectations/predictions regarding regular word form and order. The present study investigated how these two prediction-modulating fundamentals of poetic diction affect the cognitive processing and aesthetic evaluation of poems, humoristic couplets and proverbs. We developed quantitative measures of these two groups of text features. Across the three text genres, higher deviation scores reduced both comprehensibility and aesthetic liking whereas higher parallelism scores enhanced these. The positive effects of parallelism are significantly stronger than the concurrent negative effects of the features of deviation. These results are in accord with the hypothesis that art reception involves an interplay of prediction errors and prediction error minimization, with the latter paving the way for processing fluency and aesthetic liking.
Sprachentwicklungstest zum Kasus bei bilingualen Vorschulkindern: Sprachstand Deutsch (KT-DEU)
(2020)
This study investigates the question of whether the processing of complex anaphors require more cognitive effort than the processing of NP-anaphors. Complex anaphors refer to abstract objects which are not introduced as a noun phrase and bring about the creation of a new discourse referent. This creation is called “complexation process”. We describe ERP findings which provide converging support for the assumption that the cognitive cost of this complexation process is higher than the cognitive cost of processing NP-anaphors.
Cutler, Anne: Native listening. Language experience and the recognition of spoken words [Rezension]
(2013)
We had found ourselves in the “Gutenberg-Galaxy” before the digitalization made its rise. The development of the book printing by Johannes Gutenberg and developments based on it as well as the following industrialization of printing are decisive for the expansion of the cultural revolution. It has meanwhile been transformed, upgraded and replaced by something which has been called “Turing Galaxy”. One of the most important changes is the automatic processing of data, the program-controlled production or manipulation of texts, images, sounds, formulas, tables and videos. The internet has led us to new distribution channels. The paper shows which trends of development concerning the cultural skills of writing and reading have been realized up to now as a result of the digitalization. Three aspects of development will be discussed: how the way of writing has changed to the present moment by the means of automation, multimodality and networking.
In recent times presentations have drawn the attention of scientific interest as a new form of communication. In visualization of abstract structures or relationships in scholarly presentations using diagrams, different medial layers of meaning are conjoined in a very special way. The present paper examines firstly the multimodal structure of presentations and the mechanisms of establishing cross-modality coherence. Then the results of a reception experiment are discussed that gives rise to the assumption that multimodality can in fact improve the understanding of scholarly presentations. In the final part of the paper the production of an abstract visualization in a scholarly presentation is exemplified with regard to the solution of disambiguation and linearization problems. We claim that abstract visualizations in presentations are used to produce narratives by the speaker, and without such narratives this kind of visualization cannot be understood properly.
Handlungsanweisungen werden traditionell als sprachlich geäußerte Aktionspläne aufgefasst, denen ein Akteur strikt zu folgen hat. Diese Auffassung führt allerdings dann zu Problemen, wenn der Akteur teilweise autonom handeln kann. Wie soll eine Handlungsanweisung in diesem Fall das Verhalten des Akteurs lenken, ohne zugleich seine Autonomie in der Handlungsausführung einzuschränken?
Henning Lobin wählt in seinem Buch einen alternativen Ansatz: Handlungsanweisungen werden lediglich als Basis für einen Planungsprozess verstanden, zu dem auch andere Kompetenzen des Akteurs wie visuelle Wahrnehmung, Erfahrung und Wissen beitragen. Der Autor vergleicht die sprachlichen Instruktionsformen mit konzeptuellen Strukturen und leitet daraus bestimmte Regeln ab, die zu Aktivitätsschemata als Planungsressourcen führen können. Abschließend diskutiert der Autor die Nutzung von derartigen Planungsressourcen in konkreten Systemen.
In this paper, the meaning and processing of the German conditional connectives (CCs) such as wenn ‘if’ and nur wenn ‘only if’ are investigated. In Experiment 1, participants read short scenarios containing a conditional sentence (i.e., If P, Q.) with wenn/nur wenn ‘if/only if’ and a confirmed or negated antecedent (i.e., P/not-P), and subsequently completed the final sentence about Q (with or without negation). In Experiment 2, participants rated the truth or falsity of the consequent Q after reading a conditional sentence with wenn or nur wenn and a confirmed or negated antecedent (i.e., If P, Q. P/not-P. // Therefore, Q?). Both experiments showed that neither wenn nor nur wenn were interpreted as biconditional CCs. Modus Ponens (If P, Q. P. // Therefore, Q) was validated for wenn, whereas it was not validated in the case of nur wenn. While Denial of the Antecedent (If P, Q. not-P. // Therefore, not-Q.) was validated in the case of nur wenn, it was not validated for wenn. The same method was used to test wenn vs. unter der Bedingung, dass ‘on condition that’ in Experiment 3, and wenn vs. vorausgesetzt, dass ‘provided that’ in Experiment 4. Experiment 5, using Affirmation of the Consequent (If P, Q. Q. // Therefore, P.) to test wenn vs. nur wenn replicated the results of Experiment 2. Taken together, the results show that in German, unter der Bedingung, dass is the most likely candidate of biconditional CCs whereas all others are not biconditional. The findings, in particular of nur wenn not being semantically biconditional, are discussed based on available formal analyses of conditionals.
Das Programm für eine sog. kognitive Wissenschaft scheitert an der Aufgabe, der Intentionalität mentaler Zustände und Vorgänge Rechnung zu tragen. Insbesondere scheitert die kognitive Linguistik an der Intentionalität des Sprechens. Damit wird auch die Sprachauffassung vor allem der generativen Grammatik hinfällig; sie muß durch eine Weiterentwicklung der Sprachbegriffe ersetzt werden, die man in der Sprachwissenschaft bei der praktischen Arbeit im allgemeinen voraussetzt. Eine Neuorientierung in der Sprachwissenschaft scheint erforderlich.
Sigmund Freuds Sprachdenken
(2002)
Two very reliable influences on eye fixation durations in reading are word frequency, as measured by corpus counts, and word predictability, as measured by cloze norming. Several studies have reported strictly additive effects of these 2 variables. Predictability also reliably influences the amplitude of the N400 component in event-related potential studies. However, previous research suggests that while frequency affects the N400 in single-word tasks, it may have little or no effect on the N400 when a word is presented with a preceding sentence context. The present study assessed this apparent dissociation between the results from the 2 methods using a coregistration paradigm in which the frequency and predictability of a target word were manipulated while readers’ eye movements and electroencephalograms were simultaneously recorded. We replicated the pattern of significant, and additive, effects of the 2 manipulations on eye fixation durations. We also replicated the predictability effect on the N400, time-locked to the onset of the reader’s first fixation on the target word. However, there was no indication of a frequency effect in the electroencephalogram record. We suggest that this pattern has implications both for the interpretation of the N400 and for the interpretation of frequency and predictability effects in language comprehension.
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 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 investigate whether prototypicality or prominence of semantic roles can account for role-related effects in sentence interpretation. We present two acceptability-rating experiments testing three different constructions: active, personal passive and DO-clefts involving the same type of transitive verbs that differ with respect to the agentive role features they select. Our results reveal that there is no cross-constructional advantage for prototypical roles (e.g., agents), hence disconfirming a central tenet of role prototypicality. Rather, acceptability clines depend on the construction under investigation, thereby highlighting different role features. This finding is in line with one core assumption of the prominence account stating that role features are flexibly highlighted depending on the discourse function of the respective construction.
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.
Sind Phraseologismen Fertigteile und Versatzstücke, sprachliches fast food, schnell produziert und wenig komplex im Verstehen - oder sind sie besonders aufwändig, Ausdruck eines elaborierten Stils, der einen bestimmten Entwicklungsstand und besondere Kenntnisse erfordert - auch im Hinblick auf eine angemessene Rezeption? Ergeben sich solche Versatzstücke als Nebenwirkungen trivialer sprachlicher Lernprozesse oder sind Phraseologismen das Resultat besonders anspruchsvoller Erwerbsaktivitäten? Liegen die phraseologischen Besonderheiten im Verarbeitungsprozess oder im Zugriff auf die vorbestehende Speicherung? Die linguistische Forschungsliteratur kennt beide Denkrichtungen. Die Psycholinguistik ermöglicht es, einen Teil der Widersprüche aufzulösen. Die folgenden Auffassungen zu den Spielräumen des Sprachverstehens wurden im Rahmen der Psycholinguistik der Phraseologie in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten empirisch entwickelt und gewinnen inzwischen auch in der definitorisch und textlinguistisch orientierten Phraseologietheorie an Bedeutung.
1. Das Konzept der Konstitution der phraseologischen Bedeutung auf unterschiedlichen Wegen - je nach Kontext und verstehender Person.
2. Die Vorstellung vom Nebeneinander der ein- und mehrdimensionalen Bedeutungskonstitution: der Synkretismus als unmarkierter Fall vs. die besondere Möglichkeit der Wahrnehmung der vollen Ambuigität.
3. Die Auffassung des individuellen Umgangs nicht nur mit der phraseologischen Bedeutung, sondern auch mit den Bedeutungen der phraseologischen Komponenten bei Erwachsenen ebenso wie bei Kindern.
Die Spielräume des Sprachverstehens gerade der Phraseologismen sind gross. Ihre Wahrnehmung und Beschreibung lassen sich zusammenführen mit kulturwissenschaftlich begründeten Auffassungen von der Individualität von Verstehensprozesssen, ihrer Freiheit, ihrer Offenheit und ihrem Reichtum auf der einen Seite, aber auch der Oberflächlichkeit von Rezeptionsprozessen auf der andern Seite - jenseits jener text- und intentionsbesessenen Perspektive, die Generationen von Schülerinnen und Lehrerinnen das Leben schwer gemacht hat - ausgedrückt und gleichzeitig karikiert in der stereotypen Ausgangsfrage: Und was hat der Autor uns sagen wollen? Es wird in der empirischen Forschung zur Psycholinguistik der Phraseologie besonders deutlich, was auch in anderen linguistischen Fachbereichen gilt: Eine „ordentliche" semiotische Herleitung der Bedeutung von Phraseologismen, die wörtliche und übertragene Bedeutung sauber getrennt hält und oft als logisch bezeichnet wird, kommt den Bedürfnissen der Analyse entgegen, trifft aber nicht die Vorgänge beim Sprachgebrauch. Die gegenstandskonstituierende Ausgangshypothese für den inneren idiomatischen Kern der idiomatischen Phraseologie, wonach die phraseologische Gesamtbedeutung nicht die Summe der Bedeutungen der einzelnen Wörter sein kann, erweist sich - nicht als falsch, aber als zu eng und hat sich als Hintergrund einer ganzen Reihe von reduktionistischen Auffassungen und damit als problematisch herausgestellt für eine adäquate lebensnahe Beschreibung des Verstehens von Phraseologismen.
Die zentrale Forschungsmethode in der Psycholinguistik ist das psychologische Experiment. Dadurch unterscheidet sich die psycholinguistische Forschung in mancher Hinsicht von anderen Gebieten der Sprachwissenschaften, in denen die Beobachtung natürlichen Vorkommens sprachlicher Phänomene eine deutlich größere Rolle spielt. Ich werde im folgenden Beitrag nach einer kurzen Definition psycholinguistischer Fragestellungen zunächst Experiment und Beobachtung einander gegenüberstellen und dabei dafür argumentieren, dass es sich hier um einander ergänzende Herangehensweisen handelt. Ich werde dann verschiedene psycholinguistische Experimentaltechniken vorstellen, von sehr einfachen Fragebogentechniken bis hin zu technisch höchst aufwendigen Methoden wie der Messung von Blickbewegungen oder von sprachspezifischen EEG-Mustern. Hier werde ich versuchen, deutlich zu machen, dass nicht die Kosten allein die Qualität einer Technik ausmachen, sondern die Angemessenheit für die Fragestellung.
Die Sprachverarbeitung beim Übersetzen unterliegt zwei gegenläufigen Forderungen: der ausgangstextbasierten Äquivalenzforderung und der funktionalistischen Zielpublikumsorientierung. So können Übersetzungen mehr oder weniger wie eine Kopie des Ausgangstextes in einer anderen Sprache wirken, je nachdem wie wörtlich oder frei übersetzt wurde. Dieses Entscheidungskontinuum lässt sich mit dem Entropiebegriff operationalisieren. Je höher die Entropie, desto mehr Übersetzungsvarianten gibt es fur einen ausgangssprachlichen Ausdruck. Welche Rolle hierbei das mentale Lexikon spielt und inwiefern die Entropie die kognitiven Prozesse beim Übersetzen beeinflusst, kann durch experimentelle Forschung untersucht werden. In einer ersten Studie haben wir den Einfluss des mentalen Lexikons auf die Übersetzungsentropie und dessen Entwicklungspotenzial bei Studierenden am Beispiel von Kognaten untersucht. Die zweite Studie belegt den Zusammenhang zwischen Entropie und der kognitiven Belastung am Beispiel verschiedener Wortarten. Durch die Datentriangulation von produkt- und prozessbasierten Ergebnissen lassen sich spezifische Verwendungsmuster ableiten.
When appearance does not match accent: neural correlates of ethnicity-related expectancy violations
(2017)
Most research on ethnicity in neuroscience and social psychology has focused on visual cues. However, accents are central social markers of ethnicity and strongly influence evaluations of others. Here, we examine how varying auditory (vocal accent) and visual (facial appearance) information about others affects neural correlates of ethnicity-related expectancy violations. Participants listened to standard German and Turkish-accented speakers and were subsequently presented with faces whose ethnic appearance was either congruent or incongruent to these voices. We expected that incongruent targets (e.g. German accent/Turkish face) would be paralleled by a more negative N2 event-related brain potential (ERP) component. Results confirmed this, suggesting that incongruence was related to more effortful processing of both Turkish and German target faces. These targets were also subjectively judged as surprising. Additionally, varying lateralization of ERP responses for Turkish and German faces suggests that the underlying neural generators differ, potentially reflecting different emotional reactions to these targets. Behavioral responses showed an effect of violated expectations: German-accented Turkish-looking targets were evaluated as most competent of all targets. We suggest that bringing together neural and behavioral measures of expectancy violations, and using both visual and auditory information, yields a more complete picture of the processes underlying impression formation.
Most research on ethnicity has focused on visual cues. However, accents are strong social cues that can match or contradict visual cues. We examined understudied reactions to people whose one cue suggests one ethnicity, whereas the other cue contradicts it. In an experiment conducted in Germany, job candidates spoke with an accent either congruent or incongruent with their (German or Turkish) appearance. Based on ethnolinguistic identity theory, we predicted that accents would be strong cues for categorization and evaluation. Based on expectancy violations theory we expected that incongruent targets would be evaluated more extremely than congruent targets. Both predictions were confirmed: accents strongly influenced perceptions and Turkish-looking German-accented targets were perceived as most competent of all targets (and additionally most warm). The findings show that bringing together visual and auditory information yields a more complete picture of the processes underlying impression formation.
Prejudice against a social group may lead to discrimination of members of this group. One very strong cue of group membership is a (non)standard accent in speech. Surprisingly, hardly any interventions against accent-based discrimination have been tested. In the current article, we introduce an intervention in which what participants experience themselves unobtrusively changes their evaluations of others. In the present experiment, participants in the experimental condition talked to a confederate in a foreign language before the experiment, whereas those in the control condition received no treatment. Replicating previous research, participants in the control condition discriminated against Turkish-accented job candidates. In contrast, those in the experimental condition evaluated Turkish- and standard-accented candidates as similarly competent. We discuss potential mediating and moderating factors of this effect.