Project C7

3rd Phase - The effect of linguistic and non-linguistic contextual information on the use of information-structural alternatives in language production and language processing

Project C7 looks into the effect contextual information has on language processing. Both language production and language comprehension will be investigated. In a number of different studies, two types of context will be compared – linguistic context and visually presented context. The leading question is whether visually induced saliency has a comparable effect on the interpretation and processing of different word orders and on linguistic choice as verbally expressed information structure.

The question is interesting for two different reasons: First, it is theoretically relevant in that it will shed some light on the question whether and how information structure can be explained by underlying cognitive mechanisms like, e.g., selective attention. Second, if our studies can show that visual context affects language processing in a similar way as verbal context, this finding will be practically relevant, too. It will allow us to develop experimental paradigms for research on information structure with children and adults with acquired language disorders, e.g., after a stroke. Prospectively, such a course of action will permit investigating whether successful processing of information structure occurs independently of successful syntactic processing. With the visually-based methods developed in the present project, we will be able to look at the ability to process information structure in patients who have known deficits in syntactic processing.

In different studies we want to look at different language modalities (language comprehension and language production) and different information structural phenomena (word order, focus particles, and syntactic function assignment)

Principal Investigators

  • Prof. Dr. Katharina Spalek
  • Prof. Dr. Isabell Wartenburger

Former Staff Members

  • Juliane Burmester
  • Nicole Gotzner

Student Assistants

  • Linda Giesel
  • Anna Richert
  • Franziska Machens

Activities

March 2016 Talk Burmester, J., Spalek, K. & Wartenburger, I.: How verbal vs. visual-perceptual cues affect sentence comprehension. Talk at CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Gainesville, Florida, USA.
March 2016 Poster Burmester, J., Wiese, H., Wartenburger, I. & Wittenberg, E.: Variation in the German sentence “forefield”: The impact of visual context for the evaluation of verb-second (V2) violations Poster to be presented at the Workshop `The Attentive Listener in the Visual World´. Potsdam, Germany.
June 2015 Poster Burmester, J., Spalek, K. & Wartenburger, I.: Salience – a modality independent cue of topicality? Poster to be presented at the International Conference on Prominence in Language (ICPL 2015). Cologne, Germany.
May 2015 Poster Burmester, J., Spalek, K. & Wartenburger, I.: Effect of verbal and visual context information on sentence comprehension - online and offline data. Poster to be presented at the International Conference of the Collaborative Research Centre “Information Structure”. Berlin, Germany.
August 2013 Talk Burmester, J., Wartenburger, I., & Spalek, K.: The Effect of Discourse Context on Online Sentence Processing. Paper presented at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. (CogSci 2013). Berlin, Germany.
August 2013 Poster Gotzner, N., Spalek, K. & Wartenburger, I.: How pitch accents andfocus particles affect the recognition of contextual alternatives. Poster presented at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. (CogSci 2013). Berlin, Germany.
June 2013 Talk Burmester, J., Spalek, K., & Wartenburger, I.: ERPs reflect discourse integration during sentence processing. Talk at Detec-Workshop: Discourse expectations: Theoretical, experimental, and computational perspectives (Detec 2013). University Tübingen.
April 2013 Poster Gotzner, N., Spalek, K. & Wartenburger, I.: The cognitive reality ofalternative sets – how focus-sensitive particles hamper the recognition ofcontrastive alternatives. Poster presented at Linguistic Evidence 2013 - Berlin special Meeting, Berlin.
March 2013 Poster Gotzner, N., Spalek, K. & Wartenburger, I.: How focus particle like‘only’ hamper the rejection of contrastive alternatives. Poster presented at CUNY 2013, 26th Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Columbia, SC.
September 2012 Poster Gotzner, N., Spalek, K. & Wartenburger, I.: Focus particles enhancememory for focus alternatives. Poster presented at AMLaP 2012, 18th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, Riva del Garda.
August 2012 Poster Burmester, J., & Wartenburger, I.: Effect of verbal and visual context information on sentence comprehension. Poster presented at CITEC Summerschool. Bielefeld.