Referential coherence in first and second language learners

In this research, it was investigated how monolingual and bilingual learners of German between the age of 5 and 10 resolve anaphoric pronouns. A visual world paradigm was employed to measure what parts of a visual stimulus participants attend to while presented with short spoken texts, in which a sentence that starts with a gender encoding anaphoric pronoun follows a sentence in which two referents are mentioned. Both referents were always unambiguously distinguishable by sexus (the king, the fairy). To shed light on pre- and post-pronominal processing, we manipulated the syntactic role of the referents in the preceding sentence to which the personal pronoun referred.

Project publications

• Die Interpretation anaphorischer Pronomina bei Kindern im L1- und frühen L2-Erwerb

Klages, H. & Gerwien, J. (2018). Die Interpretation anaphorischer Pronomina bei Kindern im L1- und frühen L2-Erwerb. In: Schimke, Sarah & Hopp, Holger (Hrsg.). Sprachverarbeitung in der Zweitsprache. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

• Verstehen anaphorischer Personalpronomina im DaZ- und DaM-Erwerb

Klages, H. & Gerwien, J. (2014). Verstehen anaphorischer Personalpronomina im DaZ- und DaM-Erwerb. In: Pagonis, G. & Klages, H. (Eds.), Linguistisch fundierte Sprachförderung und Sprachdidaktik - Grundlagen, Konzepte, Desiderate. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.