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Introduction
Publications
Publications (54)
Intonation is a means of structuring discourse and one of its functions is to highlight new or contrasting information, i.e., focus. Speakers of different languages use a range of prosodic cues to mark focus. Compared to non-tonal languages such as English, tonal languages use pitch to distinguish lexical tones and focus marking. Determining the in...
Prosodic focus increases the salience of the focused word and is assumed to establish a set of alternatives [1]. Research on how prosodic focus effects recall of focused words and alternatives indicates huge interindividual differences [2]. The present study uses a data-driven approach to characterize this heterogeneity with unsupervised (clusterin...
In the current study, we explore how different information-structural devices affect which referents conversational partners expect in the upcoming discourse. Our main research question is how pitch accents (H*, L+H*) and focus particles (German nur ‘ only ’ and auch ‘also’ ) affect speakers’ choices to mention focused referents, previously mention...
Language-specific orthography (i.e., letters or bigrams that exist in only one language) is known to facilitate language membership recognition. Yet the contribution of continuous sublexical and lexical statistics to language membership decisions during visual word processing is unknown. Here, we used pseudo-words to investigate whether continuous...
In this review we provide a discussion of the concept of alternatives and its role in linguistic and psycholinguistic theorizing in the context of the contributions that have appeared in the Frontiers Research Topic The Role of Alternatives in Language. We are discussing the linguistic phenomena for which alternatives have been argued to play a par...
Focus highlights the fact that contextual alternatives are relevant for the interpretation of an utterance. For example, if someonesays:“The meeting is on TUESDAY,”with focus marked by a pitch accent on“Tuesday,”the speaker might want to correct theassumption that the meeting is on Monday (an alternative date). Intonation as one way to signal focus...
In this review we provide a discussion of the concept of alternatives and its role in linguistic and psycholinguistic theorizing in the context of the contributions that have appeared in the Frontiers Research Topic The Role of Alternatives in Language. We are discussing the linguistic phenomena for which alternatives have been argued to play a par...
Focus highlights the fact that contextual alternatives are relevant for the interpretation of an utterance. For example, if someone says: “The meeting is on TUESDAY,” with focus marked by a pitch accent on “Tuesday,” the speaker might want to correct the assumption that the meeting is on Monday (an alternative date). Intonation as one way to signal...
This article details a correction to the article: Tjuka, A., Nguyen, H. T. T., & Spalek, K. (2020). Foxes, deer, and hedgehogs: The recall of focus alternatives in Vietnamese. 'Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology', 11(1), 16. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.253.
In tonal languages, the role of intonation in information-structuring has yet to be fully investigated. Intuitively, one would expect intonation to play only a small role in expressing communicative functions. However, experimental studies with Vietnamese native speakers show that intonation contours vary across different contexts and are used to m...
In tonal languages, the role of intonation in information-structuring has yet to be fully investigated. Intuitively, one would expect intonation to play only a small role in expressing communicative functions. However, experimental studies with Vietnamese native speakers show that intonation contours vary across different contexts and are used to m...
Categorisation is arguably the most important organising principle insemantic memory. However, elements that are not in a categorical relationcan be dynamically grouped together when the context provides a common theme for these elements. In the field of sentence (and discourse) comprehension, alternatives to a focused element can be thought of as...
Categorisation is arguably the most important organising principle in semantic memory. However, elements that are not in a categorical relation can be dynamically grouped together when the context provides a common theme for these elements. In the field of sentence (and discourse) comprehension, alternatives to a focused element can be thought of a...
Everyday communication is enriched by the visual environment that listeners concomitantly link to the linguistic input. If and when visual cues are integrated into the mental meaning representation of the communicative setting, is still unclear. In our earlier findings, the integration of linguistic cues (i.e., topic-hood of a discourse referent) r...
Focus and focus alternatives in language production
Felicitous use of focus requires various linguistic abilities: perceiving prosodic focus marking, drawing inferences about focus alternatives, and producing focus with distinct prosodic patterns. We investigated in a series of exploratory studies (a) whether individuals differ in these abilities and (b) whether individuals’ ability to perceive, com...
Focus is a central device of linguistic information structure, which has often been associated with the highlighting of (new) information or the marking of more important or informative parts of an utterance. However, these associations are only “statistical correlatives, but not definitional features, of focus” (Krifka, 2007: 30). The theory of Al...
Intuitively, in tonal languages, such as Vietnamese, one would expect intonation to play only a small role in expressing communicative functions. However, experimental studies which investigate the use of intonation and focus reject this generic claim (Đỗ et al. 1998, Vũ et al. 2006, Jannedy 2007). Moreover, Jannedy (2007) examined prosodic focus m...
Focus alternatives are words/phrases that can substitute for the focused constituent of an utterance. In "Carsten has picked [CHERRIES] F from the tree.", (marked by pitch focus on cherries), the speaker wants to not only convey the fact that Carsten has picked cherries, but also to contrast cherries with other fruit that could have been picked, su...
Focus alternatives are words/phrases that can substitute for the focused constituent of an utterance. In “Carsten has picked [CHERRIES]F from the tree.”, (marked by pitch focus on cherries), the speaker wants to not only convey the fact that Carsten has picked cherries, but also to contrast cherries with other fruit that could have been picked, suc...
The function of focus is to activate a set of alternatives, providing the locus for focus‐sensitive particles like only. In the past decade, psycholinguistic research has shown that listeners entertain a set of alternatives in online language comprehension, similar to the algorithm stipulated by Alternative Semantics. The purpose of the present rev...
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...
investigate effects of focus on recall for alternatives
Comprehension of transitive sentences relies on different kinds of information, like word order, case marking, and animacy contrasts between arguments. When no formal cues like case marking or number congruency are available, a contrast in animacy helps the parser to decide which argument is the grammatical subject and which the object. Processing...
The function of focus is to activate alternatives which are used to compute the inferences arising from an utterance. The present research examines the relationship between the activation of alternatives and the computation of implicatures from an online language processing perspective. In particular, the authors test the activation of alternatives...
Morphophonology influences subject–verb agreement in a wide variety of languages. Dominant models of agreement production [e.g. Marking and Morphing, Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., & Bock, J. K. (2005). Making syntax of sense: Number agreement in sentence production. Psychological Review, 112, 531-559. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.112.3.531 Competition...
The present research examines the mechanisms underlying the comprehension of focus alternatives. In particular, we investigate whether listeners determine alternatives based on general semantic priming mechanisms or whether they only consider contrastive alternatives, elements that can replace the expression in focus. In a probe recognition experim...
The semantics of focus particles like
only
requires a set of alternatives (Rooth, 1992). In two experiments, we investigated the impact of such particles on the retrieval of alternatives that are mentioned in the prior context or unmentioned. The first experiment used a probe recognition task and showed that focus particles interfere with the recog...
Recent psycholinguistic studies on the reality of alternative sets in processing focus NPs have shown that focus particles like ‘only’ play a special role in activating the mental representation of alternatives to focused nouns. In this paper we present a new corpus study which provides converging evidence to support psycholinguistic findings and s...
A crucial aspect of bilingual communication is the ability to identify the language of an input. Yet, the neural and cognitive basis of this ability is largely unknown. Moreover, it cannot be easily incorporated into neuronal models of bilingualism, which posit that bilinguals rely on the same neural substrates for both languages and concurrently a...
Language-specific orthography (i.e., letters or bigrams that exist in only one language) is known to facilitate language membership recognition. Yet the contribution of continuous sublexical and lexical statistics to language membership decisions during visual word processing is unknown. Here, we used pseudo-words to investigate whether continuous...
Recent evidence suggests that lexical-semantic activation spread during language production can be dynamically shaped by contextual factors. In this study we investigated whether semantic processing modes can also affect lexical-semantic activation during word production. Specifically, we tested whether the processing of linguistic ambiguities, pre...
Spoken production requires lexical selection, guided by the conceptual representation of the to-be-named target. Currently, the question whether lexical selection is subject to competition is hotly debated. In the picture-word interference task, manipulating the visibility of written distractor words provides important insights: clearly visible cat...
To communicate efficiently, speakers typically link their utterances to the discourse environment and adapt their utterances to the listener‘s discourse representation. Information structure describes how linguistic information is packaged within a discourse to optimize information transfer. The present study investigates the nature and time course...
The research reported here investigates the interplay of the overt focus operators only and also with contrastive intonation. Our experiment consisted of two parts: a naturalness rating and a delayed truth value judgement task. The results of the rating task indicate that focus particles are perceived as equally natu-ral combined with an H* accent...
Information structure describes how the information is packaged within a discourse to optimize information transfer. We addressed the question if and how a discourse context modulates the online processing of German declaratives. Native speakers of German read fictitious stories that depicted a simple action scene of two characters while we recorde...
Listeners are sensitive to contrastive alternatives in online language comprehension (e.g., Braun & Tagliapietra, 2010). Such alternatives play a crucial a role in the definition of particles like only which have been found (i) to facilitate recall of contextual alternatives (Spalek, et al., in revision) and (ii) to hamper the rejection of unmentio...
One question in word production is how the presence of a semantically related word affects the naming process. It has been suggested that semantic effects in picture-word interference tasks are a net result of both inhibitory and facilitatory processes that take place at different processing levels. Finkbeiner and Caramazza (2006) argued that maski...
A common assumption in research on spoken word production is that lexical selection is a competition-based process among co-activated lexical representations. This assumption of competitive lexical selection has been challenged by an alternative account, which places competition at a postlexical response selection stage. A complex pattern of empiri...
A number of studies have recently reported that in picture–word interference (PWI) tasks, distractors with a low frequency of occurrence interfere more with picture naming than distractors with high-frequency. This finding is not straightforward to accommodate within traditional accounts of word production in which lexical access is typically conce...
Most models of spoken production predict that shorter utterances should be initiated faster than longer ones. However, whether word-length effects in single word production exist is at present controversial. A series of experiments did not find evidence for such an effect. First, an experimental manipulation of word length in picture naming showed...
The form of a determiner is dependent on different contextual factors: in some languages grammatical number and grammatical gender determine the choice of a determiner variant. In other languages, the phonological onset of the element immediately following the determiner affects selection, too. Previous work has shown that the activation of opposin...
We investigated whether bilinguals recognizing or producing noun phrases in their second language Dutch are influenced by the grammatical gender in their mother tongue German. The Dutch nouns used in the experiments were either gender-`compatible' or -`incompatible' with their German translation. Furthermore, their cognate status (form similarity w...
We used fMRI to investigate competition during language production in two word production tasks: object naming and color naming of achromatic line drawings. Generally, fMRI activation was higher for color naming. The line drawings were followed by a word (the distractor word) that referred to either the object, a related object, or an unrelated obj...
Two experiments investigate whether native speakers of French can use a noun's phonological ending to retrieve its gender and that of a gender-marked element. In Experiment 1, participants performed a gender decision task on the noun's gender-marked determiner for auditorily presented nouns. Noun endings with high predictive values were selected. T...
One of the core issues in research on the processing of grammatical gender in language production is whether it is represented as an abstract node or whether it is an inherent property of the noun. Interpretation of the relevant data is often complicated by the fact that they could theoretically concern either gender competition or determiner compe...
Janssen and Caramazza (2003) show that when producing diminutives or plurals in Dutch, determiner information about the corresponding (singular) base form is active. This is reflected in a time cost for producing the plural or the diminutive with a gender-marked determiner when these forms and the corresponding singular or base form require differe...
Projects
Project (1)
Investigate representation, recall and retrieval of focus alternatives using fMRI, EEG and behavioural methods. My project part is concerned with individual differences for focus alternative effects measures as recall. I will look at the contribution of linguistic, cognitive and focus related capabilities to the variability found in focus alternative exploitation.
