Sarah Schimke

Information structure effects on anaphora resolution in German and French: A crosslinguistic study of pronoun resolution

Abstract This paper presents an off-line study consisting of five questionnaires in which we observed interpretational preferences for ambiguous intra-sentential pronouns in parallel structures in German and French. We tested the influence of information structural factors, in particular, we compared the effects of topicalizing versus focusing potential antecedents of the ambiguous pronoun. Results replicated a baseline difference between the two languages: a subject preference in German and an object preference in French (Hemforth et al. 2010). We argue that the object preference in French is due to the fact that speakers take into account an alternative nonambiguous construction. In addition, we found that in both languages, topicalization enhances, but focusing reduces the accessibility of antecedents for pronouns in the same sentence. This stands in contrast with previous results showing an equal accessibility of focused and topicalized referents for pronouns in subsequent sentences (Cowles et al. 2007). We explain this difference with the different function of focus within and across sentences.

Referential context effects in non-native relative clause ambiguity resolution:

We report the results from two experiments investigating how referential context information affects native and non-native readers’ interpretation of ambiguous relative clauses in sentences such as The journalist interviewed the assistant of the inspector who was looking very serious. The preceding discourse context was manipulated such that it provided two potential referents for either the first (the assistant) or the second (the inspector) of the two noun phrases that could potentially host the relative clause, thus biasing towards either an NP1 or an NP2 modification reading. The results from an offline comprehension task indicate that both native English speakers’ and German and Chinese-speaking ESL learners’ ultimate interpretation preferences were reliably influenced by the type of referential context. In contrast, in a corresponding self-paced-reading task we found that referential context information modulated only the non-native participants’ disambiguation preferences but not the native speakers’. Our results corroborate and extend previous findings suggesting that non-native comprehenders’ initial analysis of structurally ambiguous input is strongly influenced by biasing discourse information.

Information Structure and Pronoun Resolution in German and French: Evidence from the Visual-World Paradigm

The experiments presented here investigated the interplay of language-specific and language-independent factors influencing within-sentence anaphora resolution. Using the visual-world paradigm, we looked at interpretation preferences in French and German. We investigated the effects of both the information status and the grammatical role of the first-mentioned referent on pronoun interpretation. The results show that the effects of grammatical role are different in the two languages: there is a clear lasting preference for the object in French but not in German. Explicitly topicalizing or focusing the first referent, however, has similar effects in the two languages: topicalization leads to more binding of ambiguous pronouns to a potential antecedent than focusing. We argue that this effect is independent of antecedent salience.

Variable Verb Placement in Second-Language German and French: Evidence from Production and Elicited Imitation of Finite and Nonfinite Negated Sentences.

This study examines the placement of finite and nonfinite lexical verbs and finite light verbs (LVs) in semispontaneous production and elicited imitation of adult beginning learners of German and French. Theories assuming nonnativelike syntactic representations at early stages of development predict variable placement of lexical verbs and consistent placement of LVs, whereas theories assuming nativelike syntax predict variability for nonfinite verbs and consistent placement of all finite verbs. The results show that beginning learners of German have consistent preferences only for LVs. More advanced learners of German and learners of French produce and imitate finite verbs in more variable positions than nonfinite verbs. This is argued to support a structure-building view of second-language development.

Different effects of focus in intra- and inter-sentential pronoun resolution in German

It is widely assumed that focused entities are more salient than non-focused ones and consequently, that an antecedent should be particularly available for a pronoun when it is foregrounded in a cleft construction. Contrary to this assumption, however, some studies observed that an antecedent focused by a cleft was less accessible than a non-focused one. We claim that the influence of clefting depends on the position of the ambiguous pronoun: clefted antecedents are only preferred as antecedents of a pronoun when the pronoun and its antecedent are in different discourse units. In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted a questionnaire and a visual world experiment in German in which we manipulated inter- vs. intra-sentential pronoun resolution. Results showed that clefting had different effects depending on the position of the pronoun. We will discuss why these results are consistent with the claim that pronouns preferentially co-refer with the sentence topic.

The influence of finiteness and lightness on verb placement in L2 German: Comparing child and adult learners:

In this study, verb placement with respect to negation is investigated in elicited production and elicited sentence imitation data collected with child second language (L2) learners of German. These data are compared to published data from adult L2 learners, which were collected with the same elicitation materials and were re-analysed for the current study. Results show that similar developmental stages can be observed in child and adult learners. In particular, contrary to previous findings, child L2 learners who had not yet fully acquired finiteness (subject–verb agreement) showed a preference for placing lexical verbs to the right of negation, rather than in a raised position to the left of negation. This pattern was observed for nonfinite and finite lexical verbs, but not for finite auxiliaries, suggesting that children, like adults, may pass through a phase where lightness influences verb placement preferences more strongly than does finiteness.

Native and Nonnative Interpretation of Pronominal Forms: Evidence from French and Turkish.

This study investigates the influence of grammatical role and discourse-level cues on the interpretation of different pronominal forms in native speakers of French, native speakers of Turkish, and Turkish learners of French. In written questionnaires, we found that native speakers of French were influenced by discourse-level cues when interpreting ambiguous overt subject pronouns in French, whereas native speakers of Turkish were mainly influenced by a syntactic cue—subjecthood—when interpreting null subjects (pro) in Turkish translation equivalents. When interpreting implicit subjects of nonfinite dependent clauses (PRO), native speakers of both French and Turkish were influenced by subjecthood. Finally, Turkish learners of French were influenced by discourse-level cues in the interpretation of overt pronouns as well as PRO and showed no subject preference in either case. These results are in line with approaches to second language (L2) acquisition that stress the role of discourse-level principles in the processing and use of a L2 (Clahsen & Felser, 2006 ; Klein & Perdue, 1997 ).

Differences or fundamental differences

In his paper, Meisel discusses the differences between (bilingual) L1 ((2)L1), child L2 (cL2), and adult L2 (aL2) acquisition. He claims that both types of L2 acquisition are fundamentally different from (monolingual as well as bilingual) L1 acquisition. He argues that these fundamental differences are due to neuronal maturation and that they concern in particular the acquisition of morphosyntax. Meisel presents both neurological and linguistic evidence suggesting that the age of approximately 3;7 till 4 years is critical such that children who acquire a language after the age of acquisition (AoA) of 4 should in general be classified as cL2 learners, whereas children that start learning one (or several) languages before the AoA of 4 are expected to behave like L1 acquirers. More specifically, Meisel postulates that maturational changes in the course of childhood explain why L1 and L2 acquisition proceed in different ways. He reviews neuroimaging studies that show that L2 learners process syntactically deviant sentences differently from native speakers (Weber-Fox & Neville 1999). The results of these studies suggest that L2 learners show a more diffuse spatial distribution of activation patterns as well as increased activation in the right hemisphere. According to Weber-Fox & Neville (1999), the critical age ranges from which on these changes appear lie around the age of four and the age of seven. Meisel takes this as evidence that there are qualitative changes in the acquisition process around these two age ranges. To further pinpoint the areas of grammar where L2 acquisition might be fundamentally different from L1, Meisel considers linguistic evidence

Focusing Functional Elements: Affirmative Particles and Verum Focus in First Language Acquisition of German

ABSTRACT We examine whether German children attach an adultlike relevance to the pragmatic category of polarity contrast (e.g., In my picture the child IS eating the candies following after In my picture the child is not eating the candies) with linguistic expressions (i.e., the affirmative particles schon/doch/wohl ‘indeed’ and accented auxiliary verbs, known as verum focus) that are frequent in adult speech. A picture-difference task with 4–6-year-olds and an adult control group shows that both groups mark polarity contrast with similar frequency but with strikingly different means: The adults produced verum focus; the children most often used particles. Moreover, the use of polarity-related expressions competes with structures that are never used by adults but are nevertheless adapted to the information structure context at hand. Overall, our findings suggest that from the repertoire of context-adapted solutions, children prefer structures that are conceptually and formally easier and maximally transparent.

Understanding Indirect Reference in a Visual Context

ABSTRACT We often use pronouns like it or they without explicitly mentioned antecedents. We asked whether the human processing system that resolves such indirect pronouns uses the immediate visual-sensory context in multimodal discourse. Our results showed that people had no difficulty understanding conceptually central referents, whether explicitly mentioned or not, whereas referents that were conceptually peripheral were much harder to understand when left implicit than when they had been mentioned before. Importantly, we showed that people could not recover this information from the visual environment. The results suggest that the semantic–conceptual relatedness of the potential referent with respect to the defining events and actors in the current discourse representation is a determining factor of how easy it is to establish the referential link. The visual environment is only integrated to the extent that it is relevant or acts as a fall-back when the referential search within the current discourse representation fails.