Andrea Krott

Dutch Inflection: The Rules that Prove the Exception

This chapter addresses the balance of storage and computation in the mental lexicon for fully regular and productive inflectional processes in Dutch. We present evidence that both regular inflected nouns and regular inflected verbs show clear and robust effects of storage, but that at the same time on-line parsing also plays a role. We argue that the balance of storage and computation cannot be predicted on the basis of economy of linguistic description. Instead, a range of cognitive and linguistic factors are crucial determinants.

Analogical effects on linking elements in German compound words

This paper examines whether the selection of linking elements for novel German compounds can be better explained in terms of a single or a dual-route model. Previous studies had focused on the predictability of linking elements by rules. We investigate a single-route model by focusing on the paradigmatic analogical effect of the compounds sharing the left (right) constituent with the target compound, i.e., the left (right) constituent family. A production experiment reveals an effect of the left, but not of the right constituent family. Simulation studies of the responses, using a computational model of paradigmatic analogy, show that the left constituent and its phonological and morphological properties (rime, gender, and inflectional class) simultaneously codetermine the selection of linking elements. We show how these results can be accounted for by a single-route approach, and we outline a symbolic interactive activation model that merges the factors into one psycholinguistically motivated processing mechanism.

How much exposure to English is necessary for a bilingual toddler to perform like a monolingual peer in language tests

BACKGROUND Bilingual children are under-referred due to an ostensible expectation that they lag behind their monolingual peers in their English acquisition. The recommendations of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) state that bilingual children should be assessed in both the languages known by the children. However, despite these recommendations, a majority of speech and language professionals report that they assess bilingual children only in English as bilingual children come from a wide array of language backgrounds and standardized language measures are not available for the majority of these. Moreover, even when such measures do exist, they are not tailored for bilingual children. AIMS It was asked whether a cut-off exists in the proportion of exposure to English at which one should expect a bilingual toddler to perform as well as a monolingual on a test standardized for monolingual English-speaking children. METHODS & PROCEDURES Thirty-five bilingual 2;6-year-olds exposed to British English plus an additional language and 36 British monolingual toddlers were assessed on the auditory component of the Preschool Language Scale, British Picture Vocabulary Scale and an object-naming measure. All parents completed the Oxford Communicative Development Inventory (Oxford CDI) and an exposure questionnaire that assessed the proportion of English in the language input. Where the CDI existed in the bilinguals additional language, these data were also collected. OUTCOMES & RESULTS Hierarchical regression analyses found the proportion of exposure to English to be the main predictor of the performance of bilingual toddlers. Bilingual toddlers who received 60% exposure to English or more performed like their monolingual peers on all measures. K-means cluster analyses and Levene variance tests confirmed the estimated English exposure cut-off at 60% for all language measures. Finally, for one additional language for which we had multiple participants, additional language CDI production scores were significantly inversely related to the amount of exposure to English. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS Typically developing 2;6-year-olds who are bilingual in English and an additional language and who hear English 60% of the time or more, perform equivalently to their typically developing monolingual peers.

The Nature of Anterior Negativities Caused by Misapplications of Morphological Rules

This study investigates functional interpretations of left anterior negativities (LANs), a language-related electroencephalogram effect that has been found for syntactic and morphological violations. We focus on three possible interpretations of LANs caused by the replacement of irregular affixes with regular affixes: misapplication of morphological rules, mismatch of the presented form with analogy-based expectations, and mismatch of the presented form with stored representations. Event-related brain potentials were recorded during the visual presentation of existing and novel Dutch compounds. Existing compounds contained correct or replaced interfixes (dame s salons > damessalons vs. dame n salons > damensalons womens hairdresser salons), whereas novel Dutch compounds contained interfixes that were either supported or not supported by analogy to similar existing compounds (kruidenkelken vs. ?kruidskelken herb chalices); earlier studies had shown that interfixes are selected by analogy instead of rules. All compounds were presented with correct or incorrect regular plural suffixes (damessalons vs. damessalonnen). Replacing suffixes or interfixes in existing compounds both led to increased (L)ANs between 400 and 700 msec without any evidence for different scalp distributions for interfixes and suffixes. There was no evidence for a negativity when manipulating the analogical support for interfixes in novel compounds. Together with earlier studies, these results suggest that LANs had been caused by the mismatch of the presented forms with stored forms. We discuss these findings with respect to the single/dual-route debate of morphology and LANs found for the misapplication of syntactic rules.

Linking elements in Dutch noun-noun compounds: Constituent families as analogical predictors for response latencies

This study addresses the choice of linking elements in novel Dutch noun-noun compounds. Previous off-line experiments (Krott, Baayen, & Schreuder, 2001) revealed that this choice can be predicted analogically on the basis of the distribution of linking elements in the left and right constituent families, i.e., the set of existing compounds that share the left (or right) constituent with the target compound. The present study replicates the observed graded analogical effects under time pressure, using an on-line decision task. Furthermore, the analogical support of the left constituent family predicts response latencies. We present an implemented interactive activation network model that accounts for the experimental data.

Data trimming procedure can eliminate bilingual cognitive advantage.

Bilingualism and its cognitive impacts have drawn increasing interest. Recently, inconsistencies in the findings have raised discussions on what might have caused such discrepancies and how evidence should be evaluated. This review tries to shed new light onto the reasons for the inconsistencies by taking a novel perspective. Motivated by the finding that bilingualism affects response time distribution profiles, particularly findings that suggest bilinguals have fewer long responses, we investigated the relation between maximum response times allowed/included in the analysis of an experiment and the finding of a bilingual advantage. We reviewed 68 experiments from 33 articles that compared monolingual and bilingual speakers’ performance in three commonly used non-verbal interference tasks (Simon, Spatial Stroop and Flanker). We found that studies that included longer responses in their analysis were more likely to report a bilingualism effect. We conclude that seemingly insignificant details such as the data trimming procedure can have a potential impact on whether an effect is observed. We also discuss the implication of our findings and suggest the usefulness of more fine-grid analytical procedures.

Removing speech artifacts from electroencephalographic recordings during overt picture naming

A number of electroencephalography (EEG) studies have investigated the time course of brain activation during overt word production. The interpretation of their results is complicated by the fact that articulatory movements may mask the cognitive components of interest. The first aim of the present study was to investigate when speech artifacts occur during word production planning and what effects they have on the spatio-temporal neural activation pattern. The second aim was to propose a new method that strongly attenuates speech artifacts during overt picture naming and to compare it with existing methods. EEG and surface electromyograms (EMGs) of the lips were recorded while participants overtly named pictures in a picture-word interference paradigm. The comparison of the raw data with lip EMG and the comparison of source localizations of raw and corrected EEG data showed that speech artifacts occurred mainly from ~400 ms post-stimulus onset, but some earlier artifacts mean that they occur much earlier than hitherto assumed. We compared previously used methods of speech artifacts removal (SAR) with a new method, which is based on Independent Component Analysis (SAR-ICA). Our new method clearly outperformed other methods. In contrast to other methods, there was only a weak correlation between the lip EMG and the corrected data by SAR-ICA. Also, only the data corrected with our method showed activation of cerebral sources consistent with meta-analyses of word production.

Probability in the Grammar of German and Dutch: Interfixation in Triconstituent Compounds.

This study addresses the possibility that interfixes in multiconstituent nominal compounds in German and Dutch are functional as markers of immediate constituent structure. We report a lexical statistical survey of interfixation in the lexicons of German and Dutch which shows that all interfixes of German and one interfix of Dutch are significantly more likely to appear at the major constituent boundary than expected under chance conditions. A series of experiments provides evidence that speakers of German and Dutch are sensitive to the probabilistic cues to constituent structure provided by the interfixes. Thus, our data provide evidence that probability is part and parcel of grammatical competence.

Rules and rote: beyond the linguistic either-or fallacy

We report an experiment that unambiguously shows an effect of full-form frequency for fully regular Dutch inflected verbs falling into Clahsens “default” category, negating Clahsens claim that regular complex words in the default category are not stored.

Semantic Influence on Linkers in Dutch Noun-Noun Compounds

As in many other languages, the constituents of nominal compounds in Dutch are often separated by a linking element. This study investigates to what extent form and semantic properties of the right constituents in Dutch compounds affect the choice of the linker. Using both lexical statistics and experimentation, we show that the left and right constituent families affect the choice of the linker independently of the semantic categories of the left and right constituents themselves. We also show that the choice of the linker is co-determined by the animacy and concreteness of the left constituent. No role for the semantic class of the head constituent was observed in the experiment. Apparently, linkers are non-canonical suffixes in the sense that their occurrence is codetermined by the form properties of the constituent to their right.