Richard Wiese

Philipps University of Marburg | PUM · Institute for German Linguistics

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....

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...

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...

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...

While processing continuous speech, humans use beat perception 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 language. Thi...

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 Bestim-mung 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...

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...

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...



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...

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...

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...

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...

Richard Wiese is a professor of linguistics in the Department of German Linguistics, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany. Before that, he held posts at a number of German universities, including those of Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, Kassel, Berlin, and Leipzig. His early work was on psycholinguistics (including his doctoral dissertation, Psycholinguist...

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...

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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...

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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...

On classifying and classification – a linguistic commentary n Abstract 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 t...

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 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...