Ulrike Domahs

• Professor for Neurolinguistics
• Professor at Philipps University of Marburg

This study compared word-prosodic abilities of early second language learners (eL2) and monolingual learners of German. We examined the production of word-initial and word-final clusters and the placement of stress and analyzed potential effects of cross-linguistic influence (CLI). Monolingual German-speaking children ( n = 38) and eL2-learners of...

Previous findings have demonstrated that prosodic cues accompanying expressed emotions are similar in different languages. Still, it is unclear how those suprasegmental properties vary in different languages and lead to different mappings between expressions and emotional meanings. The present study compared the production and perception of vocal e...

Standard linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to stress assignment argue that the position of word stress is determined on the basis of abstract information such as syllable weight and number of syllables in the word. In the present study, we contrasted this approach with a perspective based on learning analogies according to which speakers l...

Reading acquisition leads to the restructuring of representational units in the brain, which influences spoken word processing. This makes spoken word recognition a bimodal process. However, the organization of phonological and orthographic units is dependent on the orthographic depth of the writing system and might play a role in the bimodal proce...

Cross-cultural studies on vocal emotions point out that emotional prosody exhibit a core set of acoustic-perceptual features, which promote accurate recognition across languages. Still, culture-and language-specific paralinguistic patterns affect the encoding and decoding of vocal emotion expressions, which lead to an in-group processing advantage....

Previous behavioral studies on the processing of emotional prosody in L2 learners showed similarities and differences between L1- and L2-processing and suggested that emotional perception has both universal and culture-specific aspects. However, little is known about the processing of emotional prosody in L2 learners' brains. Therefore, the present...

The present paper investigates the use of the verb RUN in texts compiled in English by three groups of multilingual learners in the North of Italy. The participants spoke three different L1s: Ladin, Italian, and German. The main objective was to ascertain whether L1 imprints could be identified in the different groups, and whether the Ladin subject...

This study examined the effectiveness of a 10-wk intervention program based on occupational therapy principles on visual-motor integration skills and fine motor abilities in kindergartners and first graders. We recruited 55 students tested three times with the Visual-Motor Integration Test (VMI) and Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 (MABC-...

The present study investigates the production and comprehension of indefinite and definite articles as markers of givenness by typically-developing German-speaking children, from the perspective of information structure theory. The study involves 93 typically-developing children aged four to seven years old with normal language-skills and 20 adults...

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...

This chapter’s aim is to scrutinize the role of prosody in processing and producing inflected or derived phonological words. On the basis of three phenomena, it will be shown how morphological operations in German like prefixation and suffixation are constrained by prosodic properties of words. A further aim is to investigate whether children and/o...

In this study, the influence of two dialectal prosodic features on the processing of lexical meaning during spoken word recognition was investigated in German dialect and non-dialect speakers. Previous studies in the field of German dialectology investigated differences between dialectal varieties and the Standard German variety by using mainly off...

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...

The nominal number system of German is to a large degree nontransparent. Psycholinguistic models typically assume that processing number markers in German requires access to word-specific lexical knowledge. Yet, how could a person without access to an intact mental lexicon know whether a given German noun is singular or plural? Under such circumsta...

In der Sprachsystemforschung sind die prosodischen Einheiten Fuß und phonologisches Wort wichtige Domänen für die Beschreibung rhythmischer Eigen- schaften von Sprachen, phonologischer Prozesse sowie morpho-syntaktischer Eigen- schaften von Wörtern und größeren sprachlichen Einheiten. Darüber hinaus sind fuß- und wortbezogene Eigenschaften zusammen...

Im vorliegenden Handbuch präsentieren wir einen Überblick über pho- nologisches Wissen, der zwei grundlegende neuere Entwicklungen in der phone- tisch-phonologischen Forschung aufgreift. Zum einen bietet dieser Band eine neue, modalitätsübergreifende Sichtweise auf die Phonologie, wonach diese nicht auf laut- sprachliche Phänomene und Repräsentatio...

Written German is characterized by an underrepresentation of prosody. During writing acquisition, children have to tackle the question which prosodic features are realized by what means – if any. We examined traces of speech prosody in German children’s writing to dictation. A sample of 79 second graders were asked to write down eight sentences to...

Background: German participles are formed by a co-occurrence of prefixation and suffixation. While the acquisition of regular and irregular suffixation has been investigated exhaustively, it is still unclear how German children master the prosodically determined prefixation rule (prefix ge-). Findings reported in the literature are inconsistent on...

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...

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 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...

Neurological patients are often affected by discrete anomia (in the sense of preserved naming accuracy but increased naming latencies). This pattern cannot be reliably diagnosed using prevalent tests. However, specific diagnostic tools which could serve to detect discrete anomia are often not readily available. Therefore, the present study is aimed...

Zwei Entwicklungen haben unser phonologisches Wissen in den letzten Jahrzehn-ten maßgeblich erweitert. Zum einen hat die intensive Erforschung von Gebär-densprachen ergeben, dass phonologische Einheiten nicht an das lautsprachliche Medium gebunden sind. Wenn Gebärdensprachen über eine in einem nicht-lautlichen Medium realisierte Phonologie verfügen...

Neurological patients are often affected by discrete anomia (in the sense of preserved naming accuracy but increased naming latencies). This pattern cannot be reliably diagnosed using prevalent tests. However, specific diagnostic tools which could serve to detect discrete anomia are often not readily available. Therefore, the present study is aimed...

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...

There are contradicting assumptions and findings on the direction of word stress processing in German. To resolve this question, we asked participants to read tri-syllabic non-words and stress ambiguous words aloud. Additionally, they also performed a working memory (WM) task (2-back task). In non-word reading, participants’ individual WM capacity...

English, German, and Dutch show very similar word stress patterns, in that word stress is not fixed to a certain position within a word, but realized within the final three syllables. There is, however, no consensus on the actual stress-assigning algorithms and the role of quantity (e.g., Kiparsky 1982; Wiese 2000; Hayes 1995; Giegerich 1985, 1992;...

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...

Abstract Aim of this study was to investigate at what age German children master prosodic and morphological constraints in the acquisition of the word formation paradigm -heit/-keit, which is comparable to English -ness, and whether children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have difficulties identifying the prosodic cues from the input. Deri...

Abstract Recent studies suggest that morphosyntactic difficulties may result from prosodic problems. We therefore address the interface between inflectional morphology and prosody in typically developing children (TD) and children with SLI by testing whether these groups are sensitive to prosodic constraints that guide plural formation in German. A...

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...

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...

This paper aims to shed light on regularities underlying German stress assignment. The results of a pseudoword production task suggest that rhyme complexity of the final syllable is a strong predictor of main stress position in German. We also found that antepenult rhyme complexity and orthographic rhyme structure have significant effect on stress...

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...

Lists of pseudowords used.

To date, the neural correlates of phonological word stress processing are largely unknown. In the present study, we investigated the processing of word stress and vowel quality using an identity matching task with pseudowords. In line with previous studies, a bilateral fronto-temporal network comprising the superior temporal gyri extending into the...

The present study investigates the acquisition of plural markers in German children with and without language impairments using an elicitation task. In the first cross-sectional study, 60 monolingual children between three and six years of age were tested. The results show significant improvements starting at the age of five. Plural forms which req...

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 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-...

In the present paper a constraint-based description of German word prosody is suggested in which the constraint ranking is in crucial parts supported empirically by experimental findings from a pseudoword production task and from studies using electrophysiological measurements. It is shown how stress patterns of existing German words as well as exp...

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...

Background: Our knowledge about the interaction between segmental and metrical levels of representation in word production is still largely underspecified. In particular, there is only sparse evidence of how syllables are hierarchically organised into higher‐level prosodic structures such as prosodic feet and words. Furthermore, the question whethe...

Auszug: Bei der Beschreibung und Analyse von zentralen Störungen des Nachsprechens stehen - wie bei der Beschreibung und Analyse von Sprachproduktionsstörungen allgemein - Abweichungen auf der lautlichen Ebene zumeist im Vordergrund. In der schwersten Form solcher Störungen können dabei nur noch phonematische Neologismen produziert werden. Doch auc...

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...

Experimental stimuli. This file provides an overview about the experimental stimuli used.

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...

Recent cognitive and computational models (e.g. the Interacting Neighbors Model) state that in simple multiplication decade and unit digits of the candidate answers (including the correct result) are represented separately. Thus, these models challenge holistic views of number representation as well as traditional accounts of the classical problem...

This study explores the extent to which German word accent distribution is influenced by language contact with Italian. To this end, speakers from three populations with differing degrees of language contact were asked to pronounce artificial polysyllabic words: (a) monolingual German speakers, (b) German-dominant bilinguals from the South Tyrol, a...

This study explores the extent to which German word accent distribution is influenced by language contact with Italian. To this end, speakers from three populations with differing degrees of language contact were asked to pronounce artificial polysyllabic words: (a) monolingual German speakers, (b) German-dominant bilinguals from the South Tyrol, a...

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)....

This paper investigates the paradigmatic relations between inflected word forms (or their affixes) and the feature specifications of these elements. In two sentence-matching experiments German speakers had to decide whether sentence pairs involving inflected adjectives or determiners were identical or not. In both experiments, there was a delay whe...

Düsseldorf, Universiẗat, Diss., 2003 (Nicht für den Austausch).

Do different types of violations of morphosyntactic features influence sentence processing differently? • Do morphological relationships between affixes in underspecified paradigms play a role in sentence processing? • Do all types of agreement violations lead to an ungrammaticality effect in the sentence-matching task?

Recent psycholinguistic studies have provided evidence that regularly inflected words are decomposed into stems and affixes, both of which have their own representations in the mental lexicon. Specific models of the lexical organization of inflectional affixes have, however, only rarely been investigated in psycho- or neurolinguistic work. We test...

Research Questions • Do different types of violations of morphosyntactic feature influence sentence processing differently? • Do morphological relationships between affixes in underspecified paradigms play a role in sentence processing? • Do all types of agreement violations lead to an ungrammaticality effect in the sentence-matching task? The Sent...

Dualistic models of inflection assume a qualitative distinction between affix-based regular forms and stored irregular forms, predicting that the two distinct mechanisms can be selectively affected in language disorders. We present data on German participle formation from 11 agrammatic Broca's aphasics which show that irregular participles can be s...