Sandra Pappert

Methods in empirical prosody research

This book contains a collection of cutting-edge papers on methodological aspects of prosody research. Current approaches to the gathering, treatment, and interpretation of prosodic data are discussed by experts in the field, illustrated by their own empirical research. Contributions focus on the choice and measurement of prosodic parameters, the establishment of prosodic categories, annotation structures for spoken-language data, and experimental methods for production and perception studies (including the construction of materials, modes of presentation, online vs. offline tasks, judgement scales, data processing, and statistical evaluation). The volume will serve as a handbook linking data collection and interpretation, allowing researchers in linguistics and related fields to make more informed decisions concerning their empirical work in prosody.

Do lemmas speak German?: A verb position effect in German structural priming

Lexicalized theories of syntax often assume that verb-structure regularities are mediated by lemmas, which abstract over variation in verb tense and aspect. German syntax seems to challenge this assumption, because verb position depends on tense and aspect. To examine how German speakers link these elements, a structural priming study was performed which varied syntactic structure, verb position (encoded by tense and aspect), and verb overlap. Abstract structural priming was found, both within and across verb position, but priming was larger when the verb position was the same between prime and target. Priming was boosted by verb overlap, but there was no interaction with verb position. The results can be explained by a lemma model where tense and aspect are linked to structural choices in German. Since the architecture of this lemma model is not consistent with results from English, a connectionist model was developed which could explain the cross-linguistic variation in the production system. Together, these findings support the view that language learning plays an important role in determining the nature of structural priming in different languages.

Priming word order by thematic roles: No evidence for an additional involvement of phrase structure

Three experiments are reported that studied the priming of word order in German. Experiment 1 demonstrated priming of the order of case-marked verb arguments. However, order of noun phrases and order of thematic roles were confounded. In Experiment 2, we therefore aimed at disentangling the impact of these two possible factors. By using primes that differed from targets in phrase structure but were parallel with regard to the order of thematic roles, we nevertheless found priming demonstrating the critical impact of thematic roles. Experiment 3 replicated the priming effects from Experiments 1 and 2 within participants and revealed no evidence for a modulation of priming by phrase structure. Consequently, our findings suggest that word order priming crucially depends on the structural outline of thematic roles rather than on the linearization of phrases.

Bidirectional structural priming across alternations: Evidence from the generation of dative and benefactive alternation structures in German

In two experiments, we investigated the primed generation of dative and benefactive alternation structures in German. As benefactive alternation structures differ from dative alternation structures in event semantics but are assumed to inherit some of their syntactic properties, the crucial question here is whether bidirectional cross-alternation priming can be found. Experiment 1 revealed priming of dative alternation structures by benefactive alternation structures whereas Experiment 2 is the first to our knowledge to show priming of benefactive alternation structures by dative alternation structures. We conclude that structural persistence neither hinges on lexical subcategorisation frames nor is it necessarily sensitive to semantic and syntactic differences associated with dative and benefactive alternation structures. However, the effects we found are compatible with both a phrase structural account and a proto-roles account of structural priming. Moreover, the new sentence generation paradigm we designed qualified as an appropriate method to investigate structural priming for nondepictable events.

The Impact of Case and Prosody on the Availability of Argument Structures

German sentences with the subcategorizing verb in the final position are locally underspecified with respect to argument structure. The aim of the study reported here was to ascertain the influence of argument-specific and prosodic information on the availability of alternative argument structures. To achieve this goal, the processing of single vs. double object structures was investigated in two experiments. Materials consisted of sentence fragments beginning with a subject followed by an auxiliary and an object that was either marked for the dative or accusative case. Moreover, sentence fragments differed by means of prosody, being either cut out of a single or double object sentence. In Experiment 1, these sentence fragments were presented for completion by a second object and a ditransitive verb (cross-modal completion), whereas in Experiment 2, subjects had to name a case-congruent monotransitive verb after the offset of the fragment (cross-modal naming). Error rates (Experiment 1) and articulation latencies (Experiment 2) revealed an effect of case but no effect of prosody. We conclude that case has a strong impact on argument structure availability and that prosodic differences may be too subtle to influence performance in these tasks. Consequences for models of incremental sentence comprehension are discussed.