Petra B Schumacher

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of Cologne

Lexical variables such as iconicity or age of acquisition are known to be important sources of variance in psycholinguistic experiments. To control for such variables, researchers working on German Sign Language (DGS) need to use stimuli rated for these constructs (e.g., iconicity) by an independent group of participants before implementing their a...

The contemporary study of human language and communication has expanded beyond its traditional focus on spoken and written forms to incorporate gestures, facial expressions, and sign languages. This shift has been accompanied by methodological advancements that extend beyond classical tools such as tape recorders or video cameras and include motion...

This manuscript describes the multi-step stimulus creation and selection process for a study investigating phonological acquisition by hearing second language learners of German Sign Language (DGS, Deutsche Gebärdensprache) and the influence of gesture and iconicity on this trajectory. It includes (A) a predominant silent gesture elicitation task;...

Every utterance in discourse we produce arises from the interaction of numerous cognitive functions, such as semantic memory, where we store the meanings of words, executive function and working memory as required for maintenance of a discourse goal, and social cognitive abilities, such as mind-reading capacity as required for tuning what we say to...

This paper investigates the effect of intonational rises on attention towards, and ultimately, recall of, medial elements in nine-digit lists in German. Non-final triplets (positions 1, 2, 3 and 4, 5, 6) were produced with either a rise or a fall on digits in positions 3 and 6. Rises led to significantly improved recall over falls. Crucially, the n...

This article investigates the processing of intonational rises and falls when presented unexpectedly in a stream of repetitive auditory stimuli. It examines the neurophysiological correlates (ERPs) of attention to these unexpected stimuli through the use of an oddball paradigm where sequences of repetitive stimuli are occasionally interspersed with...

This pupillometric study investigates the relevance of domain-final intonation for attention-orienting in German, employing a changing-state oddball paradigm with rising, falling and neutral intonation on deviant stimuli. Pupil dilation responses (PDR) to deviants were shown to be affected by their intonation contours, strengthening the case for th...

The aim of the current study is to assess the impact of the wider discourse on pronoun interpretation. We specifically look at German demonstrative pronouns (dieser) in comparison to personal pronouns (er), investigating whether dieser-demonstratives are influenced only by factors in the preceding sentence (specifically, sentence topicality) or whe...

Language users employ creative and innovative means to refer to novel concepts. One example is place-for-event metonymy as in "How many bands played at Woodstock?" where the place name is used to refer to an event. We capitalize on the observation that place-for-event metonymy can on the one hand result in the conventionali-zation of the event read...

This study investigates "stress deafness" in bilingual speakers of Maltese and Maltese English. Although both reportedly have lexical stress, the acoustic cues to prominence appear to be relatively weak. Further, word-initial pitch peaks make pitch an unreliable cue to lexical stress, which can be elsewhere in the word. In a sequence recall task, w...

Multimodal communication research focuses on how different means of signalling coordinate to communicate effectively. This line of research is traditionally influenced by fields such as cognitive and neuroscience, human-computer interaction, and linguistics. With new technologies becoming available in fields such as natural language processing and...

The explicit marking of focus has a measurable impact on language comprehension, including the interpretation of pronouns, but so far the impact of focus on demonstrative pronouns has been largely overlooked. Using story-completion experiments with ditransitive contexts in German, we tested the role of focus in demonstrative pronoun resolution usin...

Language users employ creative and innovative means to refer to novel concepts. One example is place-for-event metonymy as in “How many bands played at Woodstock?” where the place name is used to refer to an event. We capitalize on the observation that place-for-event metonymy can on the one hand result in the conventionalization of the event readi...

Studies on pronoun resolution have mostly utilized short texts consisting of a context and a target sentence. In the current study we presented participants with nine chapters of an audio book while recording their EEG to investigate the real-time resolution of personal and demonstrative pronouns in a more naturalistic setting. The annotation of th...

This study is about F0 rises in speech and whether they are special in attracting attention. The idea originates from (neuro)cognitive studies reporting that an increase in loudness, pitch, or any other acoustic property in the signal is experienced as looming or approaching by the listener. In our study, we wanted to investigate if this looming al...

Studies on pronoun resolution have so far mostly focused on examining two-sentence items involving two potential antecedents. It has been suggested that personal pronouns refer to the most prominent candidate in the preceding discourse, while demonstrative pronouns prefer a less prominent candidate [4]. Previous studies using highly controlled expe...

Previous approaches to pronoun resolution have focused on various (interacting) features of the antecedent as governing factors of pronoun resolution. Demonstratives have been claimed to show anti- subject/-agent/-first-mention/sentence-topic preferences. We explore the impact of the wider discourse on pronoun interpretation. We look at the German...

Personal and demonstrative pronouns fulfill distinct functions and differ in their resolution preferences. Previous approaches to pronoun resolution have focused on various (interacting) features of the antecedent – e.g., subjecthood, agentivity, first mention – as governing factors of pronoun resolution. Demonstratives have been claimed to show an...

When faced with an ambiguous pronoun, an addressee must interpret it by identifying a suitable referent. It has been proposed that the interpretation of pronouns can be captured using Bayes’ Rule: P(referent|pronoun) ∝ P(pronoun|referent)P(referent). This approach has been successful in English and Mandarin Chinese. In this study, we further the cr...

Indirect anaphors (Schwarz-Friesel 2007, also known by the term bridged inferences) (e.g., Theo read an article about waste disposal. The author wrote very well.) encompass two different dimensions of newness: they represent new information and they introduce a new discourse referent into the mental model. Previous event-related potential (ERP) stu...

In discourse pragmatics, different referential forms are claimed to be indicative of the cognitive status of a referent in the current discourse. Referential expressions thereby possess a double function: They point back to an (existing) referent (form-to-function mapping), and they are used to derive predictions about a referent’s subsequent recur...

We present the first ERP experiments that test the online processing of the scalar implicature some ⇝ not all in contexts where the speaker competence assumption is violated. Participants observe game scenarios with four open cards on the table and two closed cards outside of the table, while listening to statements made by a virtual player. In the...

One of the most debated topics in figurative language studies is whether the access to non-literal meanings is direct or indirect. Although models that argue for longer processing times for figurative compared to literal meanings have been largely criticized, figurative language is often associated with increased cognitive work. We investigated whe...

Indirect anaphors (Lisa went to a wedding in Italy. The bride was beautiful.) encompass two different dimensions of newness: they represent new information and they introduce a new discourse referent into the mental model. Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies show an enhanced Late Positivity effect for indirect anaphors relative to (coref...

This paper investigates neurophysiological correlates of prosodic prominence in German with two EEG experiments. Experiment 1 tested different degrees of prominence (three accent types: L+H*, H*, H+L* and deaccentuation) in the absence of context, making the acoustic signal the only source for attention orienting. Experiment 2 tested L+H* and H+L*...

Referential dependencies for pronouns and reflexives can be established at different linguistic levels. According to the economy hierarchy of dependencies, syntactic dependencies are ‘cheaper’ than semantic dependencies, which are ‘cheaper’ than discourse dependencies. Psycholinguistic research on English and Dutch has shown that the interpretation...

Accentuation influences selective attention and the depth of semantic processing during online speech comprehension. We investigated the processing of semantically congruent and incongruent words in a language that presents cues to prosodic prominences in the region of the utterance occurring after the focussed information (the post-focal region)....

This study on German investigates the real-time comprehension of items in 'First Occurrence Focus' (focused and new), 'Second Occurrence Focus' (focused and given), 'Quasi Second Occurrence Focus' (derogatory expressions that are referentially given and lexically new) and 'Background' (non-focused and given), which are marked by different levels of...

In order to enhance students’ intrinsic motivation and learning achievement in the field of semantics, we developed the board game Seamantix, which supports teaching in introductory semantics through autonomous learning. Seamantix focuses on basic semantic knowledge including semantic relations, propositional logic, truth-conditional semantics, sem...

Priming of pragmatic enrichment has been found in behavioural studies. We extend this by examining the neural correlates of priming for two implicature categories, quantifiers and disjunctions. Participants engaged in a primed sentence-picture matching task where they were presented with a sentence (e.g., "some of the letters are Bs") followed by a...

This Special Issue on prominence in discourse originated from collaborative research at the University of Cologne within the research center Prominence in Language that considers prominence an organizational principle of language that operates at all levels of linguistic representation. Here, we focus on reflections of prominence at the level of di...

Priming of pragmatic enrichment has been found in behavioural studies. We extend this by examining the neural correlates of priming for two implicature categories, quantifiers and disjunctions. Participants engaged in a primed sentence-picture matching task where they were presented with a sentence (e.g., "some of the letters are Bs") followed by a...

We argue that prominence is a structure-building principle throughout the grammar of languages, and in particular for building discourse representations. We provide an explicit characterization of prominence as a) relational, b) dynamic, and c) as an attractor of operations. This characterization allows us to better account for other key notions of...

Priming of pragmatic enrichment has been found in behavioural studies. We extend this by examining the neural correlates of priming for two implicature categories, quantifiers and disjunctions. Participants engaged in a primed sentence-picture matching task where they were presented with a sentence (e.g., “some of the letters are Bs”) followed by a...

Introductory seminars to German linguistics lay the foundation for further linguistic course work and the students’ interest and advancement in specific topics. Therefore, it is essential for students to understand and remember elementary terminology and methodology and to be able to apply and transfer their knowledge. To support teaching through a...

Strengthening literal meanings of linguistic expressions appears central to communicative success. Weakening on the other hand would appear not to be viable given that literal meaning already grossly underdetermines reality, let alone possibility. We discuss productive weakening in fake-type adjectival modification and present evidence from event-r...

Theories on metaphor and metonymy make different claims about the nature of the underlying processes in the computation of these two types of language use, i.e., whether they differ or not. Experimental investigations of metonymy and metaphor have generally not compared these two phenomena in a straightforward manner among others due to structural...

Previous studies have identified that conceptual categories corresponding to nouns exhibit semantic domain effects: (1) classification into biological ones reflects a non-additive consideration of their defining dimensions whereas classification into artefactual and, presumably, social nouns is based on an additive one (2) nominal biological concep...

We often walk around when we have to think about something, but suddenly stop when we are confronted with a demanding cognitive task, such as calculating 1540∗24. While previous neurophysiological research investigated cognitive and motor performance separately, findings that combine both are rare. To get a deeper understanding of the influence of...

Eine neue Entwicklung im Bereich der Pragmatikforschung stellt die experimentell ausgerichtete Pragmatik dar. Die Entwicklung und Nuancierung theoretischer Modelle wurde seit der Jahrtausendwende maßgeblich durch experimentelle Herangehensweisen vorangetrieben (vgl. z. B. Breheny/Katsos/Williams 2006; Cummins/Sauerland/Solt 2012; Noveck 2001). Ausg...

There is an on-going debate about how the language system handles expressions that may refer to different word senses. Some theories propose derivational operations triggered by a type-mismatch; others assume underspecified lexical representations that engage in sense selection. Previous studies yielded mixed evidence. To further understand the div...

Research on semantic-pragmatic processing is concerned with different aspects of meaning. Sentence meaning—that is, the contribution of lexical and grammatical meaning aspects—is distinguished from speaker's meaning—a representation of the speaker's intentions that are often not expressed explicitly and must be inferred by the comprehender. This ch...

We report two experiments on the referential resolution of the German subject pronoun er and the demonstrative der (‘he’). Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we examined the effects of grammatical role, thematic role and the information status of potential referents in the antecedent clause operationalized by word-order (canonical/non-ca...

This book offers a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Different chapters examine the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors’ introduction the book...

Pragmatics is already an established subfield of linguistics and the Gricean distinction between literal and speakers' meaning is one of the foundations of modern linguistic theory. But progress in pragmatics has been slow compared to other subfields of linguistics over the last four decades. We argue that one recent trend, namely Experimental Prag...

In a reading production experiment we investigate the impact of punctuation and discourse structure on the prosodic differentiation of right dislocation (RD) and afterthought (AT). Both discourse structure and punctuation are likely to affect the prosodic marking of these right-peripheral constructions, as certain prosodic markings are appropriate...

Hierarchical predictive coding has been identified as a possible unifying principle of brain function, and recent work in cognitive neuroscience has examined how it may be affected by age–related changes. Using language comprehension as a test case, the present study aimed to dissociate age-related changes in prediction generation versus internal m...

Personal pronouns and demonstratives contribute differently to the encoding of information in the mental model and they serve distinct backward- and forward-looking functions. While (unstressed) personal pronouns are the default means to indicate coreference with the most prominent discourse entity (backward-looking function) and typically mark the...

This volume brings together studies in the domain of weak referentiality, the phenomenon that a definite or indefinite noun phrase lacks its usual referential force. Several papers investigate syntactic or semantic properties of indefinite noun phrases, such as modality, number neutrality, narrow scope, incorporation, predication, and case marking,...

The role of literal meaning during the construction of meaning that goes beyond pure literal composition was investigated by combining cross-modal masked priming and ERPs. This experimental design was chosen to compare two conflicting theoretical positions on this topic. The indirect access account claims that literal aspects are processed first, a...

An event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted to investigate how animacy interacts with givenness during topic processing. Both animacy and givenness have been considered as within-discourse factors that contribute to an element's potential to form an optimal topic (i.e., topic-worthiness). ERPs were recorded while participants read question...

Pragmatic and cognitive accounts of figurative language posit a difference between metaphor and metonymy in terms of underlying conceptual operations. Recently, other pragmatic uses of words have been accounted for in the Relevance Theory framework, such as approximation, described in terms of conceptual adjustment that varies in degree and directi...

Propositional content is often incomplete but comprehenders appear to adjust meaning and add unarticulated meaning constituents effortlessly. This happens at the propositional level (The baby drank the bottle) but also at the phrasal level (the wooden turtle). In two ERP experiments, combinatorial processing was investigated in container/content al...

The interplay of content and context is observable in a moment to moment manner as propositional content unfolds. The current contribution illustrates this through data from real-time language comprehension indicating that propositional content is not computed in isolation but relies in important ways on context during every step of the computation...

Two visual ERP experiments were conducted to investigate topic and contrast assigned by various cues such as discourse context, sentential position, and marker during referential processing in Japanese. Experiment 1 showed that there was no N400-difference for new vs. given noun phrases (NPs) when the new NP was expected (contrastively focused) bas...

We combined for the first time electrophysiological measures and masked priming technique in sentential context, by setting up a cross-modal masked priming paradigm involving the auditory presentation of sentences. ERPs were time-locked to an auditorily presented word that was preceded by a repeated, related or unrelated pattern masked prime. We re...

The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs. adje...

We present three event-related potential studies that investigated the contribution of givenness and position-induced topicality (what a sentence is about) to information processing. The studies compared two types of referential expressions (given and inferred noun phrases (NPs)) in distinct sentential positions. The data revealed position-specific...

We report an event-related potential study designed to explore the nature of context-induced topicality in Chinese discourse processing. Topic is what an utterance is about and represents the most prominent discourse element, which occurs sentence-initially in Chinese. We tested question-answer pairs consisting of topic and non-topic questions foll...

Context represents a broad range of aspects, comprising for example the conversational setting (including speaker and hearer), mutual knowledge, inter- and intratextual information. Crucially, research targeting the temporal dynamics of language processing in discourse suggests that these different features affect processes in two discrete stages....

We investigated the comprehension of the Chinese reflexive ziji, which is typically subject to long-distance binding. However, this preference can be overridden by verb semantics (some verbs require local binding) as well as by subtle feature combinations of intervening noun phrases (NPs) (e.g., 1st /2nd person pronouns block dependencies with more...

We recorded event-related brain potentials during the processing of visually presented compound words in Mandarin Chinese. We capitalized on a particular characteristic of Chinese word formation, where two constituents can be combined in two different orders (A+B or B+A), yielding distinct meanings-so-called "reversible words". By investigating the...

In languages like English or German, definite and indefinite markers serve to distinguish given/old from new information in the discourse model. Japanese, in contrast, lacks definiteness markers, but has a topic marker. The present paper examines how the information status of a noun phrase (NP) in Japanese is represented and integrated into the dis...

Language processing involving syntax-discourse interface operations has been claimed to be particularly resource-consuming. In production, this additional complexity is claimed to be the source of article omission in the speech of young children and certain language-impaired speakers. In comprehension, article omission in some "special registers" (...

In recent years, a lively debate ensued on an old issue, namely the proper distinction between semantics and pragmatics against the background of the classical Gricean distinction between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’. From a linguist’s point of view, however, there has always been a regrettable lack of empirical data in this otherwise so...

This paper investigates complex anaphoric reference (i.e., when an anaphor refers to a propositionally structured referent). Complex anaphors (e.g., this process, this event) differ in their ontological feature setup, and the ontological type assigned to a referent can change due to the lexical meaning of the complex anaphor. Previous research has...

Research on reference assignment points to two types of referential status: d(iscourse)-linked and non-d-linked, which, as the labels suggest are determined by whether or not the entity in question depends on information previously introduced in discourse. In this paper, we examine the online interpretation of the Dutch reflexive zich ('himself/her...

Discourse processing depends on semantic memory as well as maintaining and updating of a mental model. Using event-related potentials, we investigated how a referent's information status (new, accessible, given) is processed in combination with three different prosodic realizations (an appropriate accent and two inappropriate accents). The data rev...

In recent years, the availability of online techniques (i.e., when language comprehension is measured as a sentence unfolds) has given rise to a new line of research complementing traditional findings from offline methodologies and providing finer-grained characterizations of the deficit underlying aphasia. The emerging data question the classic ch...

This paper investigates the processing of indefinite and definite noun phrases in discourse. It presents data from an Event-Related brain Potential (ERP) study that contrasted definite and indefinite noun phrases following three distinct context sentences. The data suggest that coherence considerations influence early processing stages, while morph...

This Special Issue presents a collection of papers dealing with approaches to minimality in diverse areas of language and on the basis of a variety of structures. Theories on minimal phrase-structure building, emergence of the unmarked, or underspecified lexical representations are investigated by means of experimental findings revealed in psycho-...

This study provides evidence for the role of semantic composition in compound word processing. We examined the online processing of isolated two meaning unit compounds in Chinese, a language that uses compounding to 'disambiguate' meaning. Using auditory presentation, we manipulated the semantic meaning and syntactic category of the two meaning uni...

Studies of agrammatic Broca's aphasia reveal a diverging pattern of performance in the comprehension of reflexive elements: offline, performance seems unimpaired, whereas online—and in contrast to both matching controls and Wernicke's patients—no antecedent reactivation is observed at the reflexive. Here we propose that this difference characterize...

Abstract

Discourse processing depends on long-term semantic memory and discourse memory (i.e. the organization and maintenance of a mental model). Using event-related potentials, the information-processing functions of the activities manifested by a centroparietal negativity (N400) and a posterior positivity (P600) were investigated during the processing of...

The present investigation demonstrates that incremental sentence processing is guided by principles of minimal structure building. Event-related potentials (ERPs) to a local number mismatch between an auxiliary and a subsequent noun phrase revealed that the subject preference, a strategy known to be very robust during processing, can be overridden...