There is now a well-established literature showing that people anticipate upcoming concepts and words during language processing. Commonsense knowledge about typical event sequences and verbal selectional preferences can contribute to anticipating what will be mentioned next. We here investigate how temporal discourse connectives…

The present study used event related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how native (L1) German-speaking second-language (L2) learners of English process sentences containing filler-gap dependencies such as "Bill liked the house (women) that Bob built some ornaments for __ at his workplace." Using an experimental design which allowed us to…

Previous research indicates that features of speech during mother-toddler interactions are dependent on the situational context. In this study, we explored language samples of 69 mother-toddler dyads collected during standardized toy play and book-reading situations across two countries, Germany and the United States (US). The results showed that…

Non-native speakers' sensitivity to discourse-level cues in pronoun interpretation has not been widely researched. We carried out three antecedent-choice questionnaire experiments which investigate the impact of focus on within-sentence pronoun resolution in native and non-native speakers of German and native speakers of Russian. Focus was…

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…

Underspecification and coercion are two prominent interpretive mechanisms to account for meaning variability beyond compositionality. While there is plentiful evidence that natural language meaning constitution exploits both mechanisms, it is an open issue whether a concrete phenomenon of meaning variability is an instance of underspecification or…

Background: German participles are formed by a co-occurrence of prefixation and suffixation. While the acquisition of regular and irregular suffixation has been investigated exhaustively, it is still unclear how German children master the prosodically determined prefixation rule (prefix "ge-"). Findings reported in the literature are…

This article reports an eye-tracking study on the native and non-native processing of case in Spanish. Twenty-four native and 27 first language (L1) German non-native speakers of Spanish were tested on their sensitivity to case marking violations involving structural case with objects of ditransitive verbs and to violations of inherent case for…

Adopting a bimodal bilingual language acquisition model, this qualitative case study is the first in Germany to investigate the spoken and sign language development of hearing children of deaf adults (codas). The spoken language competence of six codas within the age range of 3;10 to 6;4 is assessed by a series of standardised tests (SETK 3-5,…

One pronoun production experiment and one pronoun comprehension experiment were performed to investigate the role of grammatical number information in long-distance anaphora, with referent and pronoun either in adjacent sentences or separated by an intervening sentence. The experiments tested the assumption that the influence of grammatical number…

In the present article we provide evidence for the occurrence of transfer of conceptualization patterns in narratives of two German-Turkish bilingual groups. All bilingual participants grew up in Germany, but only one group is still resident in Germany (n = 49). The other, the returnees, moved back to Turkey after having lived in Germany for…

Examines how young children describe reversals of action that restore objects to a prior, less-constrained, state. In both English and German, children first rely on the verb "open"; they then use their knowledge of particle pairs. Reentry into a prior state is underlined by uses of "back" and "wieder" and the…

How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words.…

This paper analyses an extensive corpus of texts from the German media and existing studies of German perspectives on Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic and Slovenia in order to demonstrate that there are two idealised culture cognitive models (ICCMs) that function as overarching categories for Europe: the ICCM west (the members of the European…