Lars Konieczny

University of Freiburg | Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg · Center for Cognitive Science

In reading conventional poems aloud, the rhythmic experience is coupled with the projection of meter, enabling the prediction of subsequent input. However, it is unclear how top-down and bottom-up processes interact. If the rhythmicity in reading loud is governed by the top-down prediction of metric patterns of weak and strong stress, these should...

Many theories of verbal humour postulate that the funniness of jokes is caused by an incongruency in the punchline whose resolution yields a feeling of mirth. While there are studies testing the prediction that this situation model updating leads to increases in processing costs, there are few studies directly assessing the time course of when the...

Standard theories of focus expressed by cleft structures, for instance (Beaver & Clark 2008; Krifka 2007), assume that the motivation for the use of focus is discourse relevance: focus establishes an answer to the question under discussion (Roberts 2004: 216). This account, however, lacks a theory of how alternative sets are generated in real disco...

The present study investigates effects of conventionally metered and rhymed poetry on eye-movements in silent reading. Readers saw MRRL poems (i.e., metrically regu-lar, rhymed language) in two layouts. In poem layout, verse endings coincided with line breaks. In prose layout verse endings could be mid-line. We also added metrical and rhyme anomali...

Two visual world eyetracking studies on irony processing in context.

Hemforth & Konieczny (2019) suggest that the existence of an accessible alternative such as “Not all my friends went to the movies.” plays a role in cross-linguistic differences in the interpretation of “all...not” constructions, such as “All my friends didn’t go to the movies.”, explaining the preference for linear scope in English and German wher...

Substantial individual differences exist in regard to type and amount of experience with variable speech resulting from foreign or regional accents. Whereas prior experience helps with processing familiar accents, research on how experience with accented speech affects processing of unfamiliar accents is inconclusive, ranging from perceptual benefi...

In this paper, we will present crosslinguistic data on the interpretation of negation over quantifier scope in sentences like “All children did not go to the zoo.” Questionnaire data show that English as well as German speakers prefer a linear scope interpretation of the quantifier and the negation, where it is true for all children that they did n...

In Construction Grammar, argument structures are considered autonomous constructions, i.e. form-meaning pairings, independent of their lexical content. Earlier research has shown that argument structure is a valid factor in a variety of off-line interpretation tasks. However, it remains unclear whether argument structure is processed automatically...

In this paper, we present crosslinguistic data on the interpretation of negation over quantifier scope in sentences like “All children did not go to the zoo.” Questionnaire data show that English as well as German speakers prefer a linear scope interpretation of the quantifier and the negation, where it is true for all children that they did not go...

Being a nonnative speaker of a language poses challenges. Individuals often feel embarrassed by the errors they make when talking in their second language. However, here we report an advantage of being a nonnative speaker: Native speakers give foreign-accented speakers the benefit of the doubt when interpreting their utterances; as a result, appare...

Der Begriff der Resonanz - ursprünglich eine akustische Metapher - wird derzeit vielfach verwendet, um sprachliche und leibliche, aber auch psychologische und physikalische Prozesse zu beschreiben. Es geht um die Bedingungen dafür, dass etwas oder jemand in Schwingung versetzt wird, und darum, welche Rückkopplungen durch solches Mitschwingen in Int...

p>Being a non-native speaker of a language poses challenges. Individuals often feel embarrassed by the errors they make when talking in their second language (L2). However, here we report an advantage of being an L2 speaker: native speakers give foreign-accented speakers the benefit of the doubt when interpreting their utterances, such that apparen...

In collaborative wayfinding, partners jointly search the environment for task-relevant information. Studies on collaborative search suggest that it is most efficient to divide the search space so that each partner monitors only the space in front of herself. Cooperation, in contrast, requires the establishment of a perceptual common ground to coord...

German, English, Spanish, and French versions of short (ia) and long (ib) relative clauses were tested in written questionnaire studies. The noun phrases containing the clauses appeared in either object position (as in i) or in subject/topic position, and the relative clauses ambiguously modified the first or the second noun of the noun phrase.(i)....

Pure alexia is a severe impairment of word reading which is usually accompanied by a right-sided visual field defect. Patients with pure alexia exhibit better preserved writing and a considerable word length effect, claimed to result from a serial letter processing strategy. Two experiments compared the eye movements of four patients with pure alex...

Like many other processes in language comprehension, anaphora resolution is determined by what is said. But is this all? Or to what extent is anaphora resolution also influenced by what is not said but could have been said? We present a questionnaire, a self-paced reading study and a corpus analysis, suggesting that the existence of possible altern...

Pure alexia is a severe impairment of word reading in which individuals process letters serially with a pronounced length effect. Yet, there is considerable variation in the performance of alexic readers with generally very slow, but also occasionally fast responses, an observation addressed rarely in previous reports. It has been suggested that "f...

Mobile eye tracking has become a fruitful method for spatial research. Body movement and orientation as well as the complexity of real-world surroundings have a strong influence on the processing of environmental information that can be captured by mobile eye tracking devices. On a methodological level, perceiv-er locomotion is both a challenge due...

This paper investigates automatic processing of novel metaphors in adults with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and typically developing controls. We present an experiment combining a semantic judgment task and a recognition task. Four types of sentences were compared: Literally true high-typical sentences, literally true low-typical sentences, apt metaphors...

Reasoning about inference problems that allow for multiple interpretations requires maintaining intermediate representations that, if necessary, may be reconsidered at a later stage of the solution process. In that respect we describe the process of annotating premises in spatial relational reasoning that allows for the derivation of alternative re...

We introduce a reading corpus comprised of 16 German texts taken from popular science journals. Texts cover several natural science topics and vary in complexity and length. The PopSci corpus is annotated with rich information on lexical, syntactic and pragmatic levels. Reading time measures were computed not only for word tokens but also for large...

Driving a car is obviously a complex task and the construction of an ACT-R (adaptive control of thought—rational) model of human attention while performing this task is similarly complex along multiple dimensions and presents a challenge to architecture and modeler. This work is a first attempt to develop an integrated driver model of attention in...

Distributional properties of language and the implicit acquisition of knowledge about these properties influences human language processing. Connectionist approaches of sentence processing provide a paradigm that places the role of frequency at the core of psycholinguistic reasoning. We introduce this paradigm and some of its consequences by focusi...

Frequency is defined in terms of number of occurrences of a given linguistic structure in a particular linguistic system or sub-system (as approximated by a suitable corpus). Frequency is assumed to be a possible determinant in usage-based models of language change, language acquisition and language processing. While the default assumption is that...

Frequency is defi ned in terms of number of occurrences of a given linguistic structure in a particular linguistic system or sub-system (as approximated by a suitable corpus). Frequency is assumed to be a possible determinant in usage-based models of language change, language acquisition and language processing. While the default assumption is that...

Distributional properties of language and the implicit acquisition of knowledge about these properties influences human language processing. Connectionist approaches of sentence processing provide a paradigm that places the role of frequency at the core of psycholinguistic reasoning. We introduce this paradigm and some of its consequences by focusi...

Zugl.: Freiburg (Breisgau), Univ., Diss., 1996.

For most people without the relevant educational background, jurisdictional texts are very hard to understand. That is a serious problem, because people’s realities and social living is shaped by those texts for the most part. There is considerable effort to (re-)formulate jurisdictional texts to make them more accessible to everyone. In the US, th...

Eye tracking has become a common method for addressing different topics in the domain of spatial cognition. However, most studies use stationary eye tracking devices to get insights into the cognitive processes of spatial navigation and wayfinding. We argue that these studies may miss important factors, because body movement and orientation as well...

Cognitive architectures can account for highly complex tasks. One of the greatest challenges is understanding and modeling human driving behavior. This paper describes an integrated cognitive model of human attention during the performance of car driving. In this task, the attention process can be divided into at least three basic components: the c...

A series of four experiments investigating gaze behavior and decision making in the context of wayfinding is reported. Participants were presented with screenshots of choice points taken in large virtual environments. Each screenshot depicted alternative path options. In Experiment 1, participants had to decide between them to find an object hidden...

Gricean Principles and frequency in anaphor resolution Beyond factors such as information structure and coherence relations, grammatical roles are assumed to be central to anaphor resolution in most languages. Generally, subjects seem to play a prominent role in a sentence and this fact makes them highly accessible or even immediately available as...

Zusammenfassung. Zur Erklärung interindividueller Unterschiede in der Sprachperformanz bei komplexen Sätzen werden zwei Ansätze diskutiert: Die Theorie der kapazitätsbeschränkten Arbeitsgedächtnisressource ( Just & Carpenter, 1992 ), sowie der auf Elman-Netzen basierende Ansatz von MacDonald und Christiansen (2002) . Letzterer setzt dem Konzept ein...

helmut.weldle@misc.uni-freiburg.de), Lars Konieczny (lars@cognition.uni-freiburg.de), Daniel Müller (daniel@cognition.uni-freiburg.de), Sascha Wolfer (sascha@cognition.uni-freiburg.de), Peter Baumann (peter.baumann@cognition.uni-freiburg.de) Abstract Recent connectionist models and theories of embodied cognition offer new perspectives on language c...

This paper addresses the question whether locally coherent word sequences in spoken sentences interfere with the global interpretation. We present a visual world experiment where three depicted events were presented simultaneously while a sentence was spoken. The results suggest that local syntactic coherences are not only processed at a syntactic...

Online available from http://www.linguistik-online.de/39_09/hansenschirraEtAl.pdf

To investigate the relationship of functions that underlie the processing of complex sentences, we conducted a self-paced- reading experiment on single and multiple center embedded subject- and object-extracted relative clauses, accompanied by three tests to measure individual differences. Our data suggest that inhibition and executive functions ar...

Language specific preferences in anaphor resolution