Susanne Borgwaldt

Form follows function: Interjections and onomatopoetica in comics

Abstract One of the specific features of language in comics is the relatively frequent occurrence of interjections, and onomatopoetica in general. Such words show remarkable variation in their written forms. In our study, we focus on these variations: We created a database of interjections′ spelling variants, based on six comics, and subsequently analysed them. First, we demonstrate that the variant spellings of interjections can be modelled within a formal theory of writing systems: Neefs Recoding Model of Graphematics, published in 2005, that distinguishes between orthography, i.e., the study of the spelling of words, and graphematics, i.e., the study of the relation between written forms and phonological representations. While theoretical models of writing systems often specifically exclude interjections from the scope of their theory, Neefs model includes them and furthermore predicts variation in their spellings. Second, we analyse which additional information can be transmitted through the choice of spelling variants, e.g., instead of , as well as by typographic means, i.e., variations in letter font, shape, size, colour, or orientation. We distinguish five possible functions which might be conveyed by the variant forms, including functions which go beyond the purpose of visualising audible phenomena (=phonetic function): alerting function, play function, relation function, and indexical function.

Association norms for German noun compounds and their constituents

We present a collection of association norms for 246 German depictable compound nouns and their constituents, comprising 58,652 association tokens distributed over 26,004 stimulus–associate pair types. Analyses of the data revealed that participants mainly provided noun associates, followed by adjective and verb associates. In corpus analyses, co-occurrence values for compounds and their associates were below those for nouns in general and their associates. The semantic relations between compound stimuli and their associates were more often co-hyponymy and hypernymy and less often hyponymy than for associations to nouns in general. Finally, we found a moderate correlation between the overlap of the associations to compounds and their constituents and the degree of semantic transparency. These data represent a collection of associations to German compound nouns and their constituents that constitute a valuable resource concerning the lexical semantic properties of the compound stimuli and the semantic relations between the stimuli and their associates. More specifically, the norms can be used for stimulus selection, hypothesis testing, and further research on morphologically complex words. The norms are available in text format (utf-8 encoding) as supplemental materials.

Shallow Versus Deep Footprints in Pseudo-Word Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion: Dutch and English

Our study is concerned with reading processes. Using a letter-detection paradigm with masked priming, we tested for the existence and time course of vowel digraph effects in Dutch and English. Whereas Dutch readers showed digraph effects with 67-ms primes, English readers showed only letter effects at 67 ms and merely a weak digraph trend at 83 ms. These findings are consistent with the PSYCHOLOGICAL GRAIN SIZE THEORY, a model of reading development that predicts that grapheme-phoneme conversion proceeds faster in shallow than in deep orthographies. This also demonstrates that similar language structures can be processed differently if they are modulated by different inter-faces, in this case, orthography.