http://hdl.handle.net/10900/77066 2026-05-12T21:13:01Z http://hdl.handle.net/10900/77660 Word Order Acceptability and Word Order Choice Verhoeven, Elisabeth; Temme, Anne Previous work has shown that the relation between acceptability ratings and frequencies in speech production is exponential. The present study examines the relation between preference ratings and frequencies of choice with a maximally controlled design, using the same material with two experimental procedures, namely a split-100 rating and a forced-choice task. The phenomenon examined is the choice between SO and OS order in German clauses with canonical and experiencer-object verbs in different contexts. The acceptability of the alternative orders under these conditions was obtained by the split-100 rating task. We assumed that the candidate that appears in speech production is the winner of the competition between SO and OS order based on their acceptability in a given condition. The results of the forced-choice task show that the relation between ratings and choice is not just linear, but can be better approximated by higher-order polynomials: the greater the distance between the acceptability values of the alternative candidates, the stronger the bias for the winner candidate. 2017-08-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10900/77659 Integration of Visual Information about the Speaker during Sentence Processing Rück, Franziska; de la Vega, Irmgard; Leuthold, Hartmut; Kaup, Barbara Do sentence meaning and contextual information get integrated in one-step or is the integration of extra-linguistic variables delayed to a second step? There are findings which point in the direction of one-step models of language comprehension. However, as of yet it is unclear to what extent these reflect low-level associations. To investigate this possibility, we manipulated the polarity of the sentences. A negative sentence still includes the critical word but now describes a plausible situation and should thus not lead to comprehension difficulties unless these are based on low-level associations. In two phrasal self-paced reading studies, we found a mismatch effect independent of polarity early on in the sentence on the phrase involving the critical word and the following phrase. An interaction appeared only at the sentence end, reflecting the mismatch effect for affirmative but not for negated sentences on that phrase. These results suggest an early word-based effect. Readers seem not to fully integrate the meaning of a sentence and the extra-linguistic information about a speaker until the end of a sentence – which seem to fit well with two-step models of comprehension. The influence of pragmatic aspects of negation in speaker-based mismatch effects are discussed. 2017-08-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10900/77657 Sentential or not? ‒ An Experimental Investigation on the Syntax of Fragments Lemke, Robin This paper presents four experiments on the syntactic structure of fragments, i.e. nonsentential utterances with propositional meaning and illocutionary force (Morgan, 1973). The experiments evaluate the predictions of two competing theories of fragments: Merchant's (2004) movement and deletion account and Barton & Progovac's (2005) nonsentential account. Experiment 1 provides evidence for case connectivity effects, this suggests that there is indeed unarticulated linguistic structure in fragments (unlike argued by Barton & Progovac 2005). Experiments 2-4 address a central prediction of the movement and deletion account: only those constituents which may appear in the left periphery are possible fragments. Merchant et al. (2013) present two studies on preposition stranding and complement clause topicalization in favor of this. My experiments 2-4 replicate and extend these studies in German and English. Taken together, the acceptability pattern predicted by Merchant (2004) holds only for the preposition stranding data (exp. 2), but not for complement clauses (exp.3) or German multiple prefield constituents (exp.4). 2017-08-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10900/77656 Personal Pronouns and D-Pronouns in German: Connecting Comprehension to Production Portele, Yvonne; Bader, Markus We review recent experiments and corpus data from our ongoing investigation of p(ersonal) and d(emonstrative) pronouns. Contrary to a widespread belief, d-pronouns did not always refer to non-topical antecedents in case of referential ambiguity. More generally, the data that we review show that a complex interplay of factors governs the processing of p-pronouns and d-pronouns. During language comprehension, syntactic function, position, and topichood of the antecedent are all taken into account when interpreting a p- or d-pronoun. Similarly, the choice between p- and d-pronoun during language production is heavily influenced by these three factors. We propose an interpretation and a production rule for d-pronouns, both based on prominence features. For interpretation, the proposed rule simply counts prominence features and assigns the d-pronoun the antecedent that is least prominent. For production, we propose a similar rule for choosing between a p- and d-pronoun for referring to a given antecedent. In contrast to interpretation, the rule for choosing a pronominal form makes use of weighted prominence features and relates prominence to production frequency in an exponential way. 2017-08-01T00:00:00Z