Marcel Schlechtweg

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg

Previous research has shown that it is difficult for English speakers to distinguish the front rounded vowels /y/ and /ø/ from the back rounded vowels /u/ and /o/. In this study, we examine the effect of noise on this perceptual difficulty. In an Oddity Discrimination Task, English speakers without any knowledge of German were asked to discriminate...

English morphosyntactic agreement, such as determiner–noun agreement in These cab s broke down and noun–verb agreement in The cab s break down , has a few interesting properties that enable us to investigate whether agreement has a psycholinguistic function, that is, whether it helps the listener process linguistic information expressed by a speake...

The role of phonetic detail within the language system and its interplay with other kinds of linguistic information represent a hotly debated territory. In the current volume, different types of phonetic nuances are examined with a particular focus on their relation to phonological, morphological, and semantic/pragmatic phenomena. These three inter...

Purpose Our goal is to understand how the different types of plural marking are understood and processed by children with cochlear implants (CIs): (a) how does salience affect the processing of plural marking, (b) how is this processing affected by the incomplete signal provided by the CIs, and (c) is it linked to individual factors such as chronol...

The ability to process plural marking of nouns is acquired early: at a very young age, children are able to understand if a noun represents one item or more than one. However, little is known about how the segmental characteristics of plural marking are used in this process. Using eye-tracking, we aim at understanding how five to twelve-year old ch...

We report results of an ongoing study examining the effects of different masking conditions (background babble, or the so-called cocktail party effect, and varying levels of noise saturation in relation to the signal, i.e. signal-to-noise ratio, henceforth SNR) on vowel recognition for two groups: native English speakers taking a test in Spanish, L...

We trained a set of K-means clustering models in an unsupervised learning environment on acoustic and visual data to address how the visual and auditory modalities interact when accessing phonological categories in the face of a noise source (which introduces entropy in the flow of information). Our objectives for the models were to explain the res...

A person’s first language (L1) affects the way they acquire speech in a second language (L2). However, we know relatively little about the role different varieties of the L1 play in the acquisition of L2 speech. This study focuses on German (L1) learners of English (L2) and asks whether the degree to which German speakers distinguish between the tw...

In this introduction, we outline the notion of quotation and shed light on the question of how quotations and the different readings quotations adopt can be theoretically implemented with a particular focus on the semantic-pragmatic interface. We then present the individual contributions to this special issue and how they contribute new observation...

Quotation marks are used for different purposes in language, one of which is to signal that something has to be interpreted in an ironic way, as in the utterance What a “nice” day! said on a rainy and cold day. The present contribution describes a reading time experiment in which we analyzed the processing and understanding of ironic written senten...

Quotation marks represent a well-known tool to refer to something in a metalinguistic way. For instance, in the sentence “Gold” is a concrete noun, we focus on a linguistic property of the noun gold rather than, or at least in addition to, its standard denotation, which is, in turn, referred to in a sentence like Gold is a strong metal. While the s...

Our pilot vowel discrimination experiment addresses the competition between attentional focus and language exposure in two noise conditions using two groups of participants (L1 English-speakers (L1-EN) taking a perception test in Spanish and L1 Spanish (L1-SP) speakers taking a perception test in Spanish). Our noise conditions included three signal...

Our pilot vowel discrimination experiment addresses the competition between attentional focus and language exposure in two noise conditions using two groups of participants (L1 English-speakers (L1-EN) taking a perception test in Spanish and L1 Spanish (L1-SP) speakers taking a perception test in Spanish). Our noise conditions included three signal...

Studies have challenged the assumption that different types of word-final s in English are homophonous. On the one hand, affixal (e.g., laps) and non-affixal s (e.g., lapse) differ in their duration; on the other hand, variation exists across several types of affixal s (e.g., between the plural (cars) and genitive plural (cars’)). This line of rese...

The occurrence of phrases inside words poses a challenge for theorizing about the boundaries of the domain of word-formation as well as the architecture of morphology in general. This survey article focuses on phrasal compounds, e.g., over-the-fence gossip, as the most typical and productive set of data and examines the structural characteristics a...

The present chapter outlines how the phonetic software Praat can be used to improve the pronunciation of German learners of English in an online-based environment and by focusing on one specific case. Bringing linguistic aspects into the virtual language classroom represents a key aspect in the current approach and functions as the starting point o...

Certain variables are responsible for acoustic differences between phonologically identical forms. One such variable is the frequency of occurrence of items. For instance, words like time and thyme in English are actually not homophonous since the word of lower frequency (thyme) is pronounced with a longer duration than the high-frequency counterpa...

While the clause-final placement of finite elements is usually quite rigid in German embedded clauses, verbal clusters mark an exception in that they allow finite temporal auxiliaries to be placed linearly before the verbal elements they embed. The prescriptive rules of Standard German suggest that there is optionality with respect to the two order...

The alveolar fricative occurs in word-final position in English in different grammatical functions. Nominal suffixes may indicate plurality (e.g. cars ), genitive case (e.g. car’s ) or plurality and genitive case in cumulation (e.g. cars’ ). Further, there are the third person singular verbal suffix (e.g. she fears ) and the cliticized forms of the...

Quotation marks are a tool to refer to the linguistic form of an expression. For instance, in cases of so-called pure quotation as in "Hanover" has three syllables, they point to the syllabic characteristics of the name of the town of Hanover. Cases of this nature differ from sentences like Hanover is a town in New Hampshire, in which Hanover is us...

How language users from different linguistic backgrounds cope with forms of complexity is still a territory with many unanswered questions. The current book is concerned with morphologically and syntactically complex items, that is, derivatives, inflected forms, compounds, phrases and forms related by agreement and examines how these constructions...

Homophonous, polysemous and syncretic words, that is, words with an identical pronunciation but a different meaning, are a well-known phenomenon in the world’s languages. In the last three decades, however, a growing body of research has revealed that supposedly identical forms in reality differ in their precise acoustic realization. Several factor...

Introduction to the volume

Compounds and phrases have been extensively contrasted on formal and functional grounds in the literature. Much less is known, however, about the cognitive differences between the two. The present article uses this observation as a point of departure and investigates whether non-lexicalized German adjective-noun compounds and phrases differ in how...

Prosody variation in general and in English in particular can have different reasons. Complex constructions of the latter language have been hotly and intensively debated in this respect in recent years. Unfortunately, the primary focus has so far laid on combinations that consist of two nouns. Other construction types, such as nominal construction...

Using data from two empirical studies, the present article investigates whether German adjective-noun compounds are inherently more appropriate to function as naming units or kind terms than the corresponding phrases. In the first experiment, it was tested whether subjects prefer a non-lexicalized compound (e.g., Kurzcouch, short_couch) or the resp...

The paper discusses the relation between stress and meaning in nonlexicalized English adjective-noun (AN) combinations. Native speakers of American English were recorded in a production study while reading sentences containing AN constructions such as black tram. These items could be interpreted in either a compositional (e.g., a tram that is black...

Over the last decades, it has been hotly debated whether and how compounds, i.e. word-formations, and phrases differ from each other. The book discusses this issue by investigating compounds and phrases from a structural, semantic-functional and, crucially, cognitive perspective. The analysis focuses on compounds and phrases that are composed of ei...

This study investigates the memorization of complex lexical items from a cross- linguistic perspective and in the context of the debate about the demarcation between morphology and syntax. For this purpose, we conducted an experimental study in which German, French and English adjective-noun/noun-adjective combinations (e.g. Jungtourist, jeune t...

The current paper discusses the lexicalization of complex constructions composed of an adjective and a noun. It is argued that compounds/compound-like constructions are more prone to become lexicalized than phrases/phrase-like constructions. The relationship between lexicalization and the cognitive process of memorization represents a key point of...