Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen

Context Improves Comprehension of Fronted Objects

Object-initial clauses (OCs) are associated with more processing difficulties than subject-initial clauses (SCs) in a number of languages (e.g. English, German and Finnish), but a supportive context can reduce or neutralize the difference between SCs and OCs with respect to reading times. Still, it is unresolved how context can affect the comprehension of OCs. In the present self-paced reading study of Danish, we therefore investigated both reading times, comprehension accuracy and response times for OCs and SCs. In line with previous studies on word order processing, OCs in an unsupportive context showed longer reading times than SCs, longer response times and a comprehension accuracy as poor as chance level. A manipulation of context showed no effect of reading time, but a supportive context had a stronger facilitating effect on comprehension (response accuracy and response time) for OCs than for SCs.

The influence of context on word order processing - An fMRI study

Abstract In languages that have subject-before-object as their canonical word order, e.g. German, English and Danish, behavioral experiments have shown more processing difficulties for object-initial clauses (OCs) than for subject-initial clauses (SCs). For processing of OCs in such languages, neuroimaging experiments have shown more activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (L-IFG) compared to SCs. The increased activation in L-IFG has been explained in terms of syntactic transformation demands, increased argument hierarchization demands, and increased load on working memory. Behavioral findings have indicated that context may facilitate syntactic processing, but it has not been investigated whether a supportive context can decrease the activity in L-IFG. With L-IFG as a region of interest (ROI), the present fMRI study of 21 Danish participants investigated how a supportive linguistic context would affect the processing of Danish main clauses with either an initial subject or an initial object. We found more activity in BA 44, BA 45 and BA 47 for OCs compared to SCs. The processing of Danish OCs is thereby seen to elicit effects in L-IFG comparable to previously investigated languages. The context manipulation showed reduced activity in BA 47 for SCs and OCs occurring after a supportive linguistic context, suggesting less pragmatic processing difficulties for sentence processing in a supportive context. Outside the ROI, the lack of context affected several regions in both the frontal, temporal and parietal lobes.

The Concept of Domain in the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor

In cognitive semantics metaphors are cross-domain mappings in the conceptual system. Thus the notion of domain plays a crucial role in the theory. However, domain is never defined, but taken for granted. By means of data from language acquisition and language production and comprehension I question the cognitive status of the notion of domain. Furthermore, I demonstrate that both linguistic and nonlinguistic evidence indicate that space and time are cognitively linked in a way that makes it problematic to claim that space is mapped onto time in the development of grammatical temporal markers.

Perspective in signed discourse: the privileged status of the signer’s locus and gaze

Abstract In gesture studies character viewpoint and observer viewpoint (McNeill 1992) characterize co-speech gestures depending on whether the gesturer’s hand and body imitate a referent’s hand and body or the hand represents a referent in its entirety. In sign languages, handling handshapes and entity handshapes are used in depicting predicates. Narratives in Danish Sign Language (DTS) elicited to make signers describe an event from either the agent’s or the patient’s perspective demonstrate that discourse perspective is expressed by which referent, the agent or the patient, the signers represent at their own locus. This is reflected in the orientation and movement direction of the manual articulator, not by the type of representation in the articulator. Signers may also imitate the gaze direction of the referent represented at their locus or have eye contact with the addressees. When they represent a referent by their own locus and simultaneously have eye contact with the addressee, the construction mixes referent perspective and narrator perspective. This description accords with an understanding of linguistic perspective as grounded in bodily perspective within a physical scene (Sweetser 2012) and relates the deictic and attitudinal means for expressing perspective in sign languages to the way perspective is expressed in spoken languages.

The interrelation of grammar, text type, and age: Expression of time relations and the pragmatic status of event participants in Danish narratives

Abstract In the past decade there has been a growing interest in the relationship between the grammatical system or type of individual languages and the characteristics of texts in these languages. This interest was in particular formulated in a project initiated by Ruth Berman and Dan Slobin (1994). The data were narratives of a wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer 1969), told by children and adults in a number of typologically different languages. With the same wordless input and the same text type the project permitted comparisons of the influence of language type and age on narratives.