Language and face in interactions: emotion perception, social meanings, and communicative intentions.

Introduction: Human emotions can be complex to interpret as they have multiple sources and are often times ambiguous, for example, when the signals sent by different channels of communication are inconsistent. Our study investigates the interaction of linguistic and facial expressions of emotions.

Methods: In two experiments, participants read short scenarios in German containing a direct utterance with positive or negative emotive markers, in combination with different facial expressions as still images of the speaker (i.

Processing Attenuating NPIs in Indicative and Counterfactual Conditionals.

Both indicative and counterfactual conditionals are known to be licensing contexts for negative polarity items (NPIs). However, a recent theoretical account suggests that the licensing of attenuating NPIs like English in the conditional antecedent is sensitive to pragmatic differences between various types of conditionals. We conducted three behavioral experiments in order to test key predictions made by that proposal.

Antilocality effect without head-final dependencies.

Antilocality effects provide strong evidence for expectation-based sentence parsing models. Previous discussion of the antilocality effect, however, largely focused on the argument-verb dependencies in verb-final constructions, for which a memory retrieval-based account has been argued to be equally adequate. To test whether the principles of expectation/memory-based accounts hold for a wider range of dependencies, we report on two self-paced reading experiments that compared two different determiners in German: the morphologically complex determiner 'the-jenig,' which obligatorily requires a relative clause, and the bare determiner 'the,' which does not trigger such expectations.

The Processing of Negation and Polarity: An Overview.

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages.

On the Acquisition of Polarity Items: 11- to 12-Year-Olds' Comprehension of German NPIs and PPIs.

Existing work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children's language input. In this paper, we report an experimental investigation on children's comprehension of two NPIs and two PPIs in German.