Publications by authors named "Johanna Steinberg"

The implementation of equal opportunities is a challenge for the staff of an anaesthesia department. At the Department of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine at Hannover Medical School, a local Gender Equality plan has been implemented to create a secure and transparent framework for reconciling scientific and clinical careers with family responsibilities. Today, family and career should be equally compatible for men and women.

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Sensory information that unfolds in time, such as in speech perception, relies on efficient chunking mechanisms in order to yield optimally-sized units for further processing. Whether or not two successive acoustic events receive a one-unit or a two-unit interpretation seems to depend on the fit between their temporal extent and a stipulated temporal window of integration. However, there is ongoing debate on how flexible this temporal window of integration should be, especially for the processing of speech sounds.

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Purpose: Effects of categorical phonotactic knowledge on pre-attentive speech processing were investigated by presenting illegal speech input that violated a phonotactic constraint in German called "g-deletion." The present study aimed to extend previous findings of automatic processing of phonotactic violations and to investigate the role of stimulus context in triggering either an automatic phonotactic repair or a detection of the violation.

Method: The mismatch negativity event-related potential component was obtained in 2 identical cross-sectional experiments with speaker variation and 16 healthy adult participants each.

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Results of a mismatch negativity experiment are reported in which the pre-attentive relevance of the German phonological alternation of final devoicing (FD) is shown in two ways. The experiment employs pseudowords. (1) A deviant [vus] paired with standard /vuzə/ did not show a mismatch effect for the voicing change in /z/ versus [s] because the two can be related by FD.

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The Mismatch Negativity (MMN), a component of the event-related potential (ERP), is elicited by a deviant following a series of standard stimuli. The present study addressed the question whether two deviants occurring successively in one hierarchically organized auditory object would elicit separate MMN responses. An example of such an object is a VC syllable (vowel+consonant).

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The mental organization of linguistic knowledge and its involvement in speech processing can be investigated using the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the auditory event-related potential. A contradiction arises, however, between the technical need for strict control of acoustic stimulus properties and the quest for naturalness and acoustic variability of the stimuli. Here, two methods of preparing speech stimulus material were compared.

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In this human ERP study, effects of language-specific phonotactic restrictions on automatic auditory speech processing were investigated by means of the dorsal fricative assimilation (DFA) that is obligatory in German grammar. Using a multiple passive oddball paradigm, we studied the deviance-related processing of phonotactically ill-formed strings violating DFA. Eight VC-syllables were created by exhaustively combining the vowels [Y,.

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In auditory speech processing, implicit linguistic knowledge is activated and applied on phonetic and segment-related phonological processing level even if the perceived sound sequence is outside the focus of attention. In this study, the effects of language-specific phonotactic restrictions on pre-attentive auditory speech processing were investigated, using the Mismatch Negativity component of the human event-related brain potential. In German grammar, the distribution of the velar and the palatal dorsal fricative is limited by an obligatory phonotactic constraint, Dorsal Fricative Assimilation, which demands that a vowel and a following dorsal fricative must have the same specifications for articulatory backness.

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Processing of an obligatory phonotactic restriction outside the focus of the participants' attention was investigated by means of ERPs using (reversed) experimental oddball blocks. Dorsal fricative assimilation (DFA) is a phonotactic constraint in German grammar that is violated in *[epsilonx] but not in [open ox], [epsilonintegral], and [open ointegral]. These stimulus sequences engage the auditory deviance detection mechanism as reflected by the MMN component of the ERP.

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