Literacy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German children and adult speakers of German and Arabic.

Animacy plays a key role for human cognition, which is also reflected in the way humans process language. However, while experiments on sentence processing show reliable effects of animacy on word order and grammatical function assignment, effects of animacy on conjoined noun phrases (e.g.

Morphosyntactic development in German-speaking individuals with Down syndrome-longitudinal data.

Introduction: The present study provides longitudinal data on the development of receptive and expressive grammar in children and adolescents with Down syndrome and addresses the role of nonverbal cognitive abilities and verbal short-term memory for morphosyntactic development.

Method: Seventeen German-speaking individuals with Down syndrome (aged 4;6-17;1 years at first testing (T1)) were assessed twice, 4;4-6;6 years apart. For a subset of five participants, there was also a third assessment 2 years after the second.

Theory of Mind in children and adolescents with Down syndrome.

Introduction: To date, the evidence regarding False Belief (FB) abilities in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) has been both sparse and contradictory. Our study is the first systematic investigation targeting the relation between FB, mental age (MA), syntactic abilities (SA) and verbal short-term memory (VSTM) in individuals with DS so far.

Method: 27 German-speaking children/adolescents with DS (aged 10;0-20;1 years) completed a location-change FB-task and four standardized measures assessing nonverbal intelligence & MA, VSTM, receptive and productive SA.

The Alignment of Agent-First Preferences with Visual Event Representations: Contrasting German and Arabic.

How does non-linguistic, visual experience affect language production? A series of experiments addressed this question by examining linguistic and visual preferences for agent positions in transitive action scenarios. In Experiment 1, 30 native German speakers described event scenes where agents were positioned either to the right or to the left of patients. Produced utterances had longer speech onset times for scenes with right- rather than left-positioned agents, suggesting that the visual organization of events can affect sentence production.

Referent Cueing, Position, and Animacy as Accessibility Factors in Visually Situated Sentence Production.

Speakers' readiness to describe event scenes using active or passive constructions has previously been attributed-among other factors-to the accessibility of referents. While most research has highlighted the accessibility of agents, the present study examines whether patients' accessibility can be modulated by means of visual preview of the patient character (derived accessibility), as well as by manipulating the animacy status of patients (inherent accessibility). Crucially, we also examined whether effects of accessibility were amenable to the visuospatial position of the patient by presenting the patient character either to the left or to the right of the agent.

Describing Events: Changes in Eye Movements and Language Production Due to Visual and Conceptual Properties of Scenes.

How can a visual environment shape our utterances? A variety of visual and conceptual factors appear to affect sentence production, such as the visual cueing of patients or agents, their position relative to one another, and their animacy. These factors have previously been studied in isolation, leaving the question about their interplay open. The present study brings them together to examine systematic variations in eye movements, speech initiation and voice selection in descriptions of visual scenes.

Verbal Agreement Inflection in German Children With Down Syndrome.

Purpose: The study aims to explore whether finite verbal morphology is affected in children/adolescents with Down syndrome (DS), whether observed deficits in this domain are indicative of a delayed or deviant development, and whether they are due to phonetic/phonological problems or deficits in phonological short-term memory.

Method: An elicitation task on subject-verb agreement, a picture-naming task targeting stem-final consonants that also express verbal agreement, a nonword repetition task, and a test on grammar comprehension were conducted with 2 groups of monolingual German children: 32 children/adolescents with DS (chronological age M = 11;01 [years;months]) and a group of 16 typically developing children (chronological age M = 4;00) matched on nonverbal mental age.

Results: Analyses reveal that a substantial number of children/adolescents with DS are impaired in marking verbal agreement and fail to reach an acquisition criterion.

Regular and irregular inflection in down syndrome - New evidence from German.

The study aims to explore whether regular inflectional morphology is affected in children/adolescents with Down syndrome (DS). German past participle forms were elicited for ten regular and ten irregular inflected verbs as well as for five novel verbs. Data were collected from a group of 21 monolingual German children and adolescents with DS (chronological age M = 11;03 years) and a group of 21 typically developing monolingual German children (chronological age M = 4;03 years) matched in chronological age to the nonverbal mental age of the DS group (mental age DS group M = 4;05 years).

Quantifier comprehension is linked to linguistic rather than to numerical skills. Evidence from children with Down syndrome and Williams syndrome.

Comprehending natural language quantifiers (like many, all, or some) involves linguistic and numerical abilities. However, the extent to which both factors play a role is controversial. In order to determine the specific contributions of linguistic and number skills in quantifier comprehension, we examined two groups of participants that differ in their language abilities while their number skills appear to be similar: Participants with Down syndrome (DS) and participants with Williams syndrome (WS).

Deficits in comprehending wh-questions in children with hearing loss - the contribution of phonological short-term memory and syntactic complexity.

The aim of the study is to investigate if German children with hearing loss (HL) display persisting problems in comprehending complex sentences and to find out whether these problems can be linked to limitations in phonological short-term memory (PSTM). A who-question comprehension test (picture pointing) and a nonword repetition (NWR) task were conducted with 21 German children with bilateral sensorineural HL (ages 3-4) and with age-matched 19 normal hearing (NH) children. Follow-up data (ages 6-8) are reported for 10 of the children with HL.

Acquisition of who-question comprehension in German children with hearing loss.

For children with sensorineural hearing loss the ability to understand wh-questions might be particularly challenging because they often have only restricted access to spoken language input during optimal periods of language acquisition. In previous research it has been suggested that this restricted input during critical stages in language acquisition might lead to syntactic deficits that persist into adolescence. In this study we want to pursue this issue by investigating the comprehension of wh-questions in German children with bilateral sensorineural hearing loss.

Language comprehension in children, adolescents, and adults with Down syndrome.

Background: There is conflicting evidence as to whether receptive language abilities of individuals with Down syndrome (DS) continue to improve into adulthood, reach a plateau in late adolescence, or even start to decline.

Aim: The study aims to shed light on the question whether receptive syntactic skills change from childhood/adolescence to adulthood and provides a detailed qualitative analysis of the receptive abilities of adults with DS.

Methods: 58 individuals with DS participated in the study: 31 children/adolescents (aged: 4;6-19;0 years) and 27 adults (aged: 20;8-40;3 years).

Inflectional morphology in German hearing-impaired children.

Despite modern hearing aids, children with hearing impairment often have only restricted access to spoken language input during the 'critical' years for language acquisition. Specifically, a sensorineural hearing impairment affects the perception of voiceless coronal consonants which realize verbal affixes in German. The aim of this study is to explore if German hearing-impaired children have problems in producing and/or acquiring inflectional suffixes expressed by such phonemes.

Testing the phonemes relevant for German verb morphology in hard-of-hearing children: the FinKon-test.

Many hard-of-hearing children show delays or disorders in the acquisition of morphology and syntax. There is an on-going discussion how these difficulties are connected to problems in the auditory domain. The article focuses on coronal consonants that function as suffixes in the German verbal inflectional system.

Broca's area and inflectional morphology: evidence from broca's aphasia and computer modeling.

In a series of articles Ullman (2001, 2004; Ullman et al., 1997) has proposed that regular inflection is critically subserved by Broca's area. This suggestion is motivated by the finding that English speaking Broca's aphasics show selective deficits with regular inflection.

Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features.

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 when an inflected form contained positive feature specifications for grammatical features that did not match the feature specifications of the grammatical context in which it appeared.

Word order in sentence processing: an experimental study of verb placement in German.

We examine the question of whether the human comprehension device exhibits word-order preferences during on-line sentence comprehension. The focus is on the positioning of finite verbs and auxiliaries relative to subjects and objects in German. Results from three experiments (using self-paced reading and event-related brain potentials) show that native speakers of German prefer to process finite verbs in second position (i.

German noun plurals: a challenge to the dual-mechanism model.

In this article, the authors test one of the central claims of the Dual-Mechanism Model (Pinker and Prince, 1994), that is, that regular inflection equals default inflection. Based on results from an elicitation task with eight agrammatic Broca's aphasics and a lexical decision task with unimpaired subjects, the authors show that this assumption is not borne out. Their data on German plural inflection rather indicate that regular inflection is not necessarily identical to default inflection.

How are inflectional affixes organized in the mental lexicon?: evidence from the investigation of agreement errors in agrammatic aphasics.

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 two recently proposed theoretical models: a representation of affixes (i) in default inheritance trees (Corbett and Fraser, 1993) and (ii) in underspecified paradigms (Wunderlich, 1996).

Inflectional morphology in German Williams syndrome.

In a recent paper, Clahsen and Almazan (1998) reported a dissociation between unimpaired regular and impaired irregular past tense morphology in English Williams syndrome (WS). Our aim is to investigate whether these findings carry over to another language with different morphological systems. We present data on regular and irregular participles and noun plurals from 2 German WS subjects and 10 controls matching in mental age.