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Introduction
I am a professor of (German) linguistics at Philipps University of Marburg, Germany, now retired. The main areas of my research are phonology and morphology, including the processing of phonological structure. In collaboration with a number of colleagues, I was involved in a series of experimental neurolinguistic studies on aspects of stress and phonotactics in various languages. At present, I am involved in editing a number of books and book series.
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Position
- Professor (Full)
Description
- I am a retired professor at the Institute for German Linguistics.
July 1981 - March 1996
Education
January 1978 - January 1983
October 1973 - June 1977
October 1971 - September 1973
Publications
Publications (128)
Vowel harmony in the standard sense is rare in Germanic, though height harmony
is attested for Buchan Scots and Old Norwegian; the quantity-based ‘vowel
balance’ of some Norwegian and Swedish dialects can also involve harmony (Riad 1998). More widespread are so-called umlaut phenomena, originating in the regressive assimilation of stem vowels to a...
German letter sequence corresponds to allophones [kv], [kf], [kʋ]. A lexical decision study reveals the relevance of allophones in word processing. We demonstrate that [kʋ] is the most preferred variant from a perceptual perspective. We show the relevance of the vowel context in phonotactic processing. The results question the standard view treatin...
The present study focuses on German word-initial consonant clusters and asks whether feature-based phonotactic preferences correlate with patterns of type and token frequencies in present-day usage. The corpus-based analyses are based on a comprehensive list of such clusters, representing current usage, and on a number of feature-based phonotactic...
Rhythm is a phenomenon which is obviously present for both language and music. However, it is unclear whether the term “rhythm” has the same meaning in these two domains, and both musicologists and cognitive scientists have disputed this. In the present paper, I argue that there are central aspects of rhythm which are indeed shared between language...
In this introduction, we first address the question of how to find the appropriate level for the comparison between language and music. Secondly, we argue that the appropriate level for this comparison is the one of prosody, subsuming supra-segmental properties such as rhythm, meter and melody. We then provide a bibliometric analysis of recent cont...
The present study provides a contrastive analysis of the production of word-final consonant clusters in German by learners of German with Egyptian Arabic as their first language. The focus is on two factors relevant for syllable phonology: sonority as the gradual increase / decrease of sounds within a syllable, and affricates as complex consonants....
Umlaut in German and Icelandic is presented as phenomena of vowel alternation. Phonological and morphological aspects are discussed in the context of descriptive and theoretical approaches.
Supplementary materials to the article "Default stress assignment in Russian: evidence from acquired surface dyslexia" by Janina Mołczanow,
Ekaterina Iskra, Olga Dragoy, Richard Wiese, Ulrike Domahs. Phonology 36, 2019
This paper reexamines theoretical constructs used in the analysis of Russian word stress, employing data from speakers with acquired surface dyslexia, a symptom which is characterised by impaired lexical access and preserved grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules. Russian stems have been traditionally analysed as lexically accented or unaccented, wi...
The current article presents the results of a psycholinguistic study on word stress productivity in Cairene Arabic. Cairene Arabic is a language with a highly predictable placement of word stress based on a very regular foot structure. Participants’ productive stress abilities are evaluated in a reading experiment using Cairene Arabic pseudowords....
We tested the hypotheses of a dual-mechanism account that words resulting from regular word formation are parsed, while irregular formations are retrieved as whole words from lexical memory. German participle formation is of particular interest, since it is concatenative for both regular and irregular participles, resulting from combinations of reg...
This paper studies some factors governing the presence or absence of word-final schwa in German.
To obtain data as homogeneous as possible we focus on three adverbs outside morphological paradigms, namely,
heut(e) ‘today’, gern(e) ‘willingly’, and bald(e) ‘soon’, in one particular text
type, the letters written by one and the same person, the wr...
The processing of phonotactic patterns is crucial in any language for the recognition of word boundaries in running speech. The present paper reports the results of a reaction time experiment with native Russian and Chinese L2 learners of German. Chinese and Russian differ from German in the complexity of possible sound combinations in the syllable...
While listening to continuous speech, humans process beat information to correctly identify word boundaries. The beats of language are stress patterns that are created by combining lexical (word-specific) stress patterns and the rhythm of a specific language. Sometimes, the lexical stress pattern needs to be altered to obey the rhythm of the langua...
Phonological knowledge of a language involves knowledge about which segments can be combined under what conditions. Languages vary in the quantity and quality of licensed combinations, in particular sequences of consonants, with Polish being a language with a large inventory of such combinations. The present paper reports on a two-session experimen...
Significance statement:
Language is the most powerful communicative medium available to humans. Nevertheless, we lack an understanding of the neurobiological basis of language processing in natural contexts: it is not clear how the human brain processes linguistic input within the rich contextual environments of our everyday language experience. T...
The Prosodic Parallelism hypothesis claims adjacent prosodic categories to prefer identical branching of internal adjacent constituents. According to Wiese and Speyer (2015), this preference implies feet contained in the same phonological phrase to display either binary or unary branching, but not different types of branching. The seemingly free sc...
Die Silbe ist eine nach bestimmten Regeln gebildete Gruppierung von Lautsegmenten. Sie ist damit eine Einheit der Lautsprache, deren nähere Bestimmung und deren Zuordnung zur Phonetik und/oder Phonologie Gegenstand dieses Beitrags ist. Der Schwerpunkt dieses Artikels liegt auf den strukturellen Bedingungen, die gegeben sein müssen, damit wir eine l...
The paper reports the results of a learnability experiment with German speakers, investigating the role of universal phonotactic constraints and language use in language processing. Making use of an artificial language paradigm, participants learned nonce words with existent and non-existent German final consonant clusters adhering to or violating...
The present collection addresses the place and role of phonology (as an object of study, not as a scientific field) within a wider range of neighboring domains. Generally, the relevance of phonological structure in language may be claimed to derive from the fact that phonology constitutes a domain of its own within language (along with syntax, sema...
The goal of this paper is to discuss phonotactic constraints that govern the formation of word-initial consonant clusters in two different languages, German and Polish, and to establish a general procedure for a rank-ordering of clusters. The description of clusters is based on corpus and dictionary data. We define several dimensions in cluster des...
According to the Rhythm Rule, two adjacent stressed (stress clashes) and unstressed (stress lapses) syllables are rhythmically ill-formed and have to be changed into well-formed structures via shifting secondary stress away from primary stress. FMRI studies on linguistic stress found effects in the supplementary motor area, insula, precuneus, super...
Language rhythm is assumed to involve an alternation of strong and weak beats within a certain linguistic domain, although the beats are not constantly isochronously distributed in natural language. In certain structures, however, stress shifts take place in order to obtain a rhythmically regular structure of alternating stressed and unstressed syl...
The neural correlates of theory of mind (ToM) are typically studied using paradigms which require participants to draw explicit, task-related inferences (e.g., in the false belief task). In a natural setup, such as listening to stories, false belief mentalizing occurs incidentally as part of narrative processing. In our experiment, participants lis...
The present paper explores the processing ofrhythmic irregularities in the form of so-called stress clashes in German noun compounds. This type ofrhythmic irregularity has been found to beproblematic as it induces higher costs in languageprocessing. Moreover, the number of syllables inr hythmically irregular structures seems to play an important ro...
This study explores the influence of focus and givenness on the cognitive processing of rhythmic irregularities occurring in natural speech. Previous ERP studies showed that even subtle rhythmic deviations are detected by the brain if attention is directed towards the rhythmic structure. By using question-answer pairs, it was investigated whether s...
Words in German show several instances of a seemingly optional schwa-zero alternation, both in relation with inflected forms as well as in the final position of stems and simplex words, as in
Large-scale corpora are used as the main source of evidence for the verification or falsification of the hypothesis. A diverse set of nouns and adverbs involv...
The adequate description of word stress is still a matter of discussion in phonological research. There are two types of approaches to explain German word stress: quantity-sensitive approaches (e.g., Giegerich 1985), on the one hand, claim that stress depends on syllable weight (the inherent structure of a syllable), quantity-insensitive approaches...
This article presents neurolinguistic data on word stress perception in Cairene Arabic, in comparison to previous results on German and Turkish. The main goal is to investigate how central properties of stress systems such as predictability of stress and metrical structure are reflected in the prosodic processing of words. Cairene Arabic is a langu...
Hierarchical predictive coding has been hailed a possible unifying principle of brain function (Friston, 2010). Here, we use syntactic and semantic cues to manipulate discourse prominence and thus predictability of the upcoming topic. Subjects are default topics and passive voice modulates topic prediction by realising a non-default (undergoer) arg...
Rytm tkwi w umyśle. Uwagi na temat rytmu w jezyku Celem artykulu jest omowienie wspolczesnych teorii rytmu wystepującego w jezykach naturalnych. Na poziomie percepcji jezyki mozna podzielic na trzy typy rytmiczne oparte na przycisku, sylabie i morze. W jezykach z rytmem opartym na przycisku, sylaby akcentowane pojawiają sie w regularnych przedziala...
This paper explores the processing of metrical structure in Russian, a language with free lexical stress. According to the existing theoretical accounts, not all Russian stems are specified for accent in the lexicon. The present study employs event-related potentials (ERPs) to find evidence to support the underlying distinction into accented and un...
This paper investigates the way the predictability of prosodic patterns in a particular language influences the processing of stress information by native speakers of that language. We extend previous findings where speakers of languages with predictable stress had difficulties to process and represent stress information when confronted with a lang...
A central question concerning word recognition is whether linguistic categories are processed in continuous or categorical ways, in particular, whether regular and irregular inflection is stored and processed by the same or by distinct systems. Here, we contribute to this issue by contrasting regular (regular stem, regular suffix) with semi-irregul...
The present study investigates the status of rhythmic irregularities occurring in natural speech and the importance of rhythmic alternations in cognitive processing. Previous studies showed the relevance of rhythm for language processing, but there has been only little research using the method of event-related potentials to investigate this phenom...
The aim of the present contribution was to examine the factors influencing the prosodic processing in a language with predictable word stress. For Polish, a language with fixed penultimate stress but several well-defined exceptions, difficulties in the processing and representation of prosodic information have been reported (e.g., Peperkamp and Dup...
Typically, plural nouns are morphosyntactically marked for the number feature, whereas mass nouns are morphosyntactically singular. However, both plural count nouns and mass nouns can be semantically interpreted as nonsingular. In this study, we investigated the hypothesis that their commonality in semantic interpretation may lead to common cortica...
The N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) has been implicated in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Administered to healthy individuals, a subanesthetic dose of the noncompetitive NMDAR antagonist ketamine reproduces several psychopathological symptoms commonly observed in patients with schizophrenia. In a counterbalanced, placebo-controlled, do...
The present paper report results of an ERP-study on German noun-noun compounds in which the influence of stress clash on stress positions within compounds is tested. In particular, it is examined whether secondary stress within a second constituent is affected by the stress pattern of a first constituent as well as by the main stress position of th...
German as well as other languages show a preference for rhythmical alternation, a phenomenon mostly discussed as the Rhythm Rule. This rule has mainly been explored on the word level, although it can also occur on a phrasal level. This study shows that it operates regularly on both levels. In contrast to its assumed appearance in English, the RR ex...
Combinations of segments in a language are subject to co-occurrence restrictions. This paper focuses on phonotactic constraints that govern the formation of word-initial consonant clusters in German. A description of the inventory of clusters results in scales of phonotactic preferability and a novel approach to a ranking of onset clusters. A set o...
This chapter will discuss rhotic sounds, its justification as a natural class in phonology and related phenomena, first by introducing the class of rhotic sounds, largely by discussing their distribution in the languages of the world, and by discussing the justification for the term rhotic by outlining cases in which rhotics clearly seem to work as...
Das Buch vermittelt gut verständlich grundlegende Kenntnisse über die Lautseite der deutschen Sprache, wie sie in Einführungskursen zur Sprachwissenschaft und zu den Grundlagen der Phonetik und Phonologie behandelt werden. Ziel des Bandes ist es, wesentliche Fragestellungen und Ergebnisse der modernen Lautforschung darzustellen. Der Bogen der Darst...
The aim of this article is to develop an optimality-theoretic account of orthographic phenomena concerning the correlation between phonetic and non-phonetic visual elements and their underlying forces. We analyse the interaction between visibility and simplicity and its influence on orthographic forms. This interaction is represented firstly by vis...
How are violations of phonological constraints processed in word comprehension? The present article reports the results of an event-related potentials (ERP) study on a phonological constraint of German that disallows identical segments within a syllable or word (CC(i)VC(i)). We examined three types of monosyllabic late positive CCVC words: (a) exis...
Der Vokalumlaut im Deutschen ist ein klassisches Problem der Phonologie, weil ein selbst völlig reguläres Phänomen der Vokalaltemation so sehr von morphologischen Bedingungen abhängig ist, daß es nach vielen Theorien nicht mehr als Gegenstand der Phonologie zu betrachten ist. Der Umlaut wird in dieser Arbeit als ein autosegmental angeordnetes Merkm...
Extrasilbizität wird in diesem Artikel als theoretisch legitime und für das Deutsche empirisch begründete phonologische Kategorie verteidigt. Einige der früheren Vorschläge für initiale Extrasilbizität werden jedoch verworfen, da die initiale Clusterbildung sich zur finalen nicht parallel verhält. Die entsprechenden Daten (Frikativ-Plosiv-Sequenzen...
This paper discusses varieties of German with respect to noun pluralisation, with a focus on the status of final plural schwa
as in Fisch-e ‘fish, pl.’. By analysing the much-discussed plural morphology of Standard German by means of both prosodic as well as morphological
principles, it is argued that final schwa in plural nouns of Standard German...
In a series of EEG experiments on German word stress we have found neurolinguistic evidence for the foot as part of the prosodic hierarchy (Domahs et al., 2008; Knaus, Wiese & Janßen, 2007). Participants were presented with German words exhibiting different stress patterns and an odd number of syllables. The words were either presented with their c...
In morphological theory, various models have been developed with respect to the appropriate levels of abstraction for stating morphological generalizations. This paper addresses a class of seemingly marginal and/or problematic phenomena in morphology and proposes that morphological descriptions regularly refer to two distinct levels of description....
The present paper explores whether the metrical foot is necessary for the description of prosodic systems. To this end, we present empirical findings on the perception of German word stress using event-related brain potentials as the dependent measure. A manipulation of the main stress position within three-syllable words revealed differential brai...
The present paper reports results from three ERP studies showing components which reflect the processing of different word stress violations dependent on distinctive task properties (explicit vs. implicit processing). The main findings were that the presentation of an incorrect stress pattern led to an N400-like component indicating increased costs...
Is it living or not? The ability to differentiate between animate and inanimate entities is of considerable value in everyday life, since it allows for the dissociation of individuals that may willfully cause an action from objects that cannot. The present fMRI study aimed to shed light on the neural correlates of animacy at a relational-interpreti...
Phonology is that part of language which comprises the systematic and functional properties of sound in language. The term ‘phonology’ is also used, with the ambiguity also found with other terms used for the description of languages, for the study of those systematic features of sound in language. In this sense, it refers to a subdiscipline of lin...
In the present study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the neurophysiological correlates of violations of word formation rules in German derivational morphology. To this end, we compared violations of the German noun forming morphemes -ung (violation of morphosyntactic category) and -heit/-keit (violation of prosodic constraints)....
Previous neuroimaging findings suggest a sensitivity of the pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus (i.e. a core subregion of Broca's area) to a number of linguistic dependencies governing the linear sequencing of information in a sentence (e.g. subjects should precede objects; the participant role hierarchy should be respected). The pr...
A number of neuroimaging studies have implicated an involvement of Broca's area, particularly of the pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), in the processing of complex (permuted) sentences. However, functional interpretations of this region's role range from very general (e.g., in terms of working memory) to highly specific (e....
A common observation in studies of imagined compared to actual movement in a reaching paradigm is the tendency to overestimate. Ofthe studies noted, reaching tasks have been presented in the midline range with visual information transmitted via both eyes open. In the present study, strong right-handers were asked to judge imagined reachability to v...
The plural morphology of German is characterised by five different plural allomorphs (-(e)n, -e, -er, -s, zero), partly combined with changes in the vowel (umlaut). While in former studies the -s plural allomorph is identified as the regular plural, the remaining forms are categorised as irregular. These observations have been discussed within the...
The basic goal of this paper is to provide a formal treatment of “orthographic principles" in terms of optimization. Starting from a discussion of a preference-oriented vs. a rule-oriented systematic theory of orthography, the paper explores an explicit description of orthographic regularities in terms of Optimality Theory, that is, in terms of a t...
The article relates to the recent debate on the proper way of classifying epileptic seizures. It studies the meaning of the German word Klassifikation in its possible contrast to the English word classification and the role of classification in the sciences. It is demonstrated that Klassifikation has a result reading as well as a process reading, a...
This commentary discusses the division of labor between syntax and phonology, starting with the parallel model of grammar developed by Jackendoff. It is proposed that linear, left-to-right order of linguistic items is not represented in syntax, but in phonology. Syntax concerns the abstract relations of categories alone. All components of grammar c...
Gegenstand dieses Beitrags ist die Natur des r-Lautes und seine Variation vor allem in den Varietäten des gegenwärtigen Deutsch. Einem Vorschlag von Richard Wiese (2001a) folgend, wird zunächst argumentiert, dass die Einheit der Laute, die allgemein als "r" bezeichnet werden, in ihrem phonotaktischen Verhalten und nicht in ihren segmentalen Eigensc...
This paper discusses different types of conversion in German and aims at developing a model that accounts for conversion as found in German, but is also likely to be applicable to a wider range of languages. Particular emphasis is put on formal properties of conversion and on the relationship between conversion and other types of word formation. Th...
Phoneticians and phonologists have always referred to a type of sound segment symbolized by "r", and recognized that this comes in various varieties. The IPA-system recognizes at least eight such kinds of "r", which can be very different from each other. The problem then is this: what makes the unity of these r-sounds, or rhotics? Ladefoged and Mad...
This paper is a study of the morphology and phonology of truncations in German (also known as i-Bildungen) within the framework of Optimality Theory. Truncations are shown to constitute a widespread and productive morphological pattern in Modern Standard German. The morphosyntactic properties of these forms are shown to follow from the assumption o...
That phonology can signal the boundaries of constituents has been well known since Trubetzkoy identified the delimitative function of phonology. In this paper, it is argued that such edge marking may be much more systematic than observed in earlier work. In particular, the stress domains (foot, word, compound, phrase) and the morphological categori...
In the tradition of linguistics, the form of a lexicalitem is generally conceived as an arbitrary string of segments. In contrast to this received view, evidence is accumulating that prosody plays a very active role in specifying the shapes of all types of lexical items. I will discuss a number of such examples from Modern Standard German, drawing...
Lexical prespecification is your friend, in Tagalog and elsewhere. Grammatical frameworks that optimize over conflicting constraints allow you to apply it minimally and in an insightful way. But there’s always a price to pay: conflict-free alternatives may have other advantages.
In this book, Richard Wiese provides the most complete and up-to-date description presently available of the phonology of German. Starting with a presentation of phonemes and their features, the author then describes in detail syllables, higher prosodic units, phonological conditions of word formation, patterns of redundancy for features, phonologi...
This commentary concentrates on the nature of irregularity in morphology. What is called “irregular” in the target article by Clahsen is not a homogeneous class. Rather, there are areas of strong subregularities in the domains both of German participle formation and of German plural information that need to be distinguished from the irregular domai...
The goal of the present study is to make the notion of the root more accessible to morphology and phonology by looking at a large corpus of roots and describing the frequency of different types of root in a constraint-based grammar.
Our research is based on a computer-readable data base of German roots compiled by Ortmann (1993) from ten different...
This paper is an attempt to show how recent principles developed in the context of theoretical phonology can help to solve certain problems in the description of the Chinese sound system. The domain of this study is principally the vowel system of Modern Standard Chinese or putônghuà. All the major allophones of the vowels are derived by well-motiv...
This paper addresses the relationship between phonology and morphology, using the vowel alternations of Standard German Umlaut and Ablaut as relevant examples. Umlaut is analysed as a completely unified process of vowel fronting which can be found in a wide variety of morphologically derived environments. A number of non-linear phonological analyse...
Language is often explained as the product of generative rules and a memorized lexicon. For example, most English verbs take a regular past tense suffix (ask-asked), which is applied to new verbs (faxed, wugged), suggesting the mental rule "add - ed to a Verb." Irregular verbs (break-broke, go-went) would be listed in memory. Alternatively, a patte...
A central question in language acquisition is whether children’s grammatical principles are identical to adults’ or whether grammatical principles undergo substantial developmental changes. Recently, researchers studying the acquisition of syntax have martialed substantial evidence in favor of a ‘continuity’ position, in which syntactic principles...
This paper investigates what looks like a case of subtractive plural morphology in Hessian German, illustrated in (1).
The existence of phrasal compounds is commonly regarded as a severe problem for the strong lexicalist hypothesis. In this squib I will argue that this problem is only apparent. In spite of all appearances to the contrary, phrasal compounds do not provide any evidence that phrasal syntax has access to the internal structure of words.
New approaches within a scientific discipline are often eye-openers; they also for the discussion of data for which preceding theories have displayed a blind spot. In this paper, I will analyse such a case from a well-known language: the schwa-zero alternation in English exemplified my marked vs. markedness and supposed vs. supposedly. The phenomen...
This paper investigates the interaction of final devoicing, each/ach alternation, and g-spirantisation, that is, of three major phonological regularities found in (Northern) High German. We discuss the contrasting perspectives of a procedural versus a declarative analysis. While the former approach makes crucial use of extrinsic rule ordering, a co...
Computational systems for the processing of natural language regularly make use of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge as components of such systems. Contrary to common assumptions, however, phonological knowledge must be an integral part of intelligent language processing systems as well, even if written rather than spoken language is the...
