Antje Sauermann

• Researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

This study investigates whether adult Turkish heritage speakers are able to refer to entities in discourse as required by semantic contexts. The focus is on the contrasting properties of Turkish (L1) and German (L2) with respect to semantics of indefiniteness, i.e., specificity and partitivity. Turkish morphologically distinguishes between specific...

This study investigates whether adult Turkish heritage speakers are able to refer to entities in discourse as required by semantic contexts. The focus is on the contrasting properties of Turkish (L1) and German (L2) with respect to semantics of indefiniteness, i.e., specificity and partitivity. Turkish morphologically distinguishes between specific...

In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center “Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define “register” as recurring variation in language use depending...

Language contact research is a vibrant discipline that is gaining in importance due to the increasing mobility of speakers and thus of languages. The essays in this volume present recent research on scenarios in which varieties of German confront one or more contact languages in different constellations. Varieties are also included which historical...

The paper investigates sociolinguistic coherence and differentiation for the example of Namibian German (‘Namdeutsch’), based on corpus data and a copy-editing task. The Namdeutsch speech community draws on a local Namibian identity as well as an ethnic German identity. At the linguistic level, this leads to a tension between a tendency for Namdeut...

We report two corpus analyses to examine the impact of animacy, definiteness, givenness and type of referring expression on the ordering of double objects in the spontaneous speech of German-speaking two- to four-year-old children and the child-directed speech of their mothers. The first corpus analysis revealed that definiteness, givenness and typ...

Comprehension of sentences in the non-canonical word order usually poses problems for preschoolers (e.g., Slobin, Dan I. and Thomas G. Bever. 1982. Children use canonical sentence schema: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition 12. 229–265). These problems may be modulated by information structure, such as the presence of a...

Sentence comprehension is optimised by indicating entities as salient through linguistic (i.e., information-structural) or visual means. We compare how salience of a depicted referent due to a linguistic (i.e., topic status) or visual cue (i.e., a virtual person's gaze shift) modulates sentence comprehension in German. We investigated processing of...

Previous research on pronoun resolution in German revealed that personal pronouns in German tend to refer to the subject or topic antecedents, however, these results are based on studies involving subject personal pronouns. We report a visual world eye-tracking study that investigated the impact of the word order and grammatical role parallelism on...

Extensive cross-linguistic work has documented that children up to the age of 9–10 make errors when performing a sentence-picture verification task that pairs spoken sentences with the universal quantifier every and pictures with entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. These errors stem from children's difficulties in restricting the domain...

This dissertation examines the impact of the type of referring expression on the acquisition of word order variation in German-speaking preschoolers. A puzzle in the area of language acquisition concerns the production-comprehension asymmetry for non-canonical sentences like "Den Affen fängt die Kuh." (“The monkey, the cow chases.”), that is, presc...

It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier every and make quantifierspreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking study tested...

Three eye movement experiments investigated the interaction between contextual and lexical focus cues during reading. Context was used to focus on either the indirect or direct object of a double object construction, which was followed by a remnant continuation that formed either a congruous or incongruous contrast with the contextually focused obj...

In this chapter, we review research investigating the influence of linguistic focus on eye movements during reading. Focus is the assignment of prominence by phonological or syntactic means, which either marks new information or indicates that a contrast should be made between the focused information and some alternatives to it. We show that focus...

We report on our ongoing investigation into the relationship between the linear order of text segments and the underlying argument structure in certain newspaper commentaries. After briefly introducing our corpus and the general layout of the research project, we describe our approach to representing argument structure as a "support graph". Then we...