Events archive

Am 6. November ab 16 Uhr veranstaltet das Heidelberg University Language and Cognition lab einen Tag der offenen Tür. An diesem Tag stellen wir das psycholinguistische Labor der Universität Heidelberg vor. Studenten, Freunde und Interessierte sind herzlich eingeladen, Wissenschaftlern über die Schulter zu schauen, die sich damit beschäftigen, wie Menschen Sprache verstehen, produzieren und erlernen.

Der Lab Day soll ein Tag der Aha-Erlebnisse sein. Wissenschaftler am HULC Lab werden allen Interessierten veranschaulichen, was die psycholinguistische Forschung untersucht.

Erfahren, wie man Sprache experimentell untersucht - Am Lab Day werden wir zeigen, welche Methoden man verwenden kann, um zu erforschen, was im Kopf eines Menschen geschieht, wenn er Sprache verwendet.

Verstehen, wie Blicke und Aufmerksamkeit zusammenhängen (Eyetracking) - Wir werden genau erklären, wie ein Eyetracker funktioniert und warum wir so ein Gerät in der psycholinguistischen Forschung einsetzen.

Ausprobieren: Als Versuchsperson bei einem psycholinguistischen Experiment mitmachen - Wer Lust hat, kann selbst an vielen verschiedenen Experimenten teilnehmen. Die Ergebnisse werden am Ende des Lab Day vorgestellt. Wir werden zwei Eyetracking-Experimente durchführen. Bei dem einen kann man erleben, wie Menschen ihre Augen wirklich bewegen, wenn sie einen Text lesen. Bei dem anderen werden wir zeigen, wie wir herausfinden, was im Kopf passiert, kurz bevor ein Mensch spricht. Außerdem wird es Experimente geben, die veranschaulichen, wie Menschen auf ihren mentalen Wortspeicher zugreifen bzw. wie man sich solch einen Wortspeicher überhaupt vorstellen kann.

Einen Einblick darin gewinnen, wie wir im HULC lab Sprachen experimentell miteinander vergleichen – Unterscheiden sich die im Gehirn ablaufenden Verarbeitungsprozesse von Sprache zu Sprache? Inwiefern hängen Sprache und Denken zusammen?

Wissen, wie die Forschung am HULC lab in der Zukunft aussieht - Womit beschäftigen sich Wissenschaftler am HULC lab momentan? Zu welchen Themen kann man am Institut für Deutsch als Fremdsprache und am Institut für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen forschen?

Weitere Informationen:

Datum: 6. November

Uhrzeit: 16:00-20:00 Uhr

Adresse: Plöck 55 / Plöck 57a, 69117 Heidelberg, Heidelberg University Language and Cognition lab, Institut für Deutsch als Fremdsprachenphilologie und Institut für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen

Website: http://hulclab.eu/index.php/labday

Kontakt: jo.gerwien@uni-heidelberg.de

Programm

Hands On! (16:00-20:00)

• Video-Präsentationen aktueller Arbeiten
• Vorstellung experimenteller Methoden: Poster, Videos, WebCam-Übertagung aus den Laboren
• Als Versuchsperson an Experimenten teilnehmen

Vorträge (18:30-20:00)

• Prof. Dr. Óscar Loureda
• Prof. Dr. Christiane von Stutterheim

Im Alltag verarbeiten wir permanent und meist unbewusst visuelle Informationen. Bestimmte visuelle Aufgaben erfordern jedoch ein spezielles Training, so zum Beispiel die Arbeit mit einem Mikroskop.

Das Projekt „Cognitive Microscopy“ fasst das Mikroskopieren als einen in Echtzeit ablaufenden Prozess der Informationsaufnahme und Verarbeitung auf, der sich aus kognitionswissenschaftlicher Perspektive erklären und mit Hilfe des Eyetrackings messen lässt. Diese Perspektive erlaubt, verschiedene Grade der Kompetenz in einem spezifischen Bereich der visuellen Informationsverarbeitung festzustellen. Zudem können Effekte didaktischer Maßnahmen ermittelt werden. Derzeit gibt es jedoch kein anwendbares kognitives Modell der Prozesse der Informationsaufnahme und -verarbeitung, das zum Beispiel auf die Mikroskopie angewendet werden kann. Weiterhin müssen statistische Verfahren entwickelt werden, die der Komplexität von Eyetrackingdaten vollständig gerecht werden.

Wann und Wo?

13. März 2017, INF 562 Heidelberg, 9.00 - 16.30 Uhr

Themenblöcke im Workshop:

1. Kompetenzdiagnostik bei visueller Verarbeitung: Online- und Offline-Methoden
2. Visuelle Suche und Mustererkennung aus kognitionswissenschaftlicher Perspektive
3. Statistische Aspekte der Mustererkennung
4. Einfluss der Sprache auf die visuelle Informationsverarbeitung

Inspirationspotenzial für die Bereiche:

• Visuelle Erfahrung
• Medien-Didaktik
• Kompetenzen des Erkenntnisgewinns im Kontext von Schule und Hochschule
• Statistik / Angewandte Mathematik
• Biologie / Medizin

Die Teilnahme am Workshop ist kostenfrei.

Am 11. Mai ab 16 Uhr veranstaltet das Heidelberg University Language and Cognition lab einen Tag der offenen Tür. An diesem Tag stellen wir das psycholinguistische Labor der Universität Heidelberg vor. Studenten, Freunde und Interessierte sind herzlich eingeladen, Wissenschaftlern über die Schulter zu schauen, die sich damit beschäftigen, wie Menschen Sprache verstehen, produzieren und erlernen.

Der Lab Day soll ein Tag der Aha-Erlebnisse sein. Wissenschaftler am HULC Lab werden allen Interessierten veranschaulichen, was die psycholinguistische Forschung untersucht.

Erfahren, wie man Sprache experimentell untersucht - Am Lab Day werden wir zeigen, welche Methoden man verwenden kann, um zu erforschen, was im Kopf eines Menschen geschieht, wenn er Sprache verwendet.

Verstehen, wie Blicke und Aufmerksamkeit zusammenhängen (Eyetracking) - Wir werden genau erklären, wie ein Eyetracker funktioniert und warum wir so ein Gerät in der psycholinguistischen Forschung einsetzen.

Ausprobieren: Als Versuchsperson bei einem psycholinguistischen Experiment mitmachen - Wer Lust hat, kann selbst an vielen verschiedenen Experimenten teilnehmen. Wir werden zwei Eyetracking-Experimente durchführen. Bei dem einen kann man erleben, wie Menschen ihre Augen wirklich bewegen, wenn sie einen Text lesen. Bei dem anderen werden wir zeigen, wie wir herausfinden, was im Kopf passiert, kurz bevor ein Mensch spricht. Außerdem wird es Experimente geben, die veranschaulichen, wie Menschen auf ihren mentalen Wortspeicher zugreifen bzw. wie man sich solch einen Wortspeicher überhaupt vorstellen kann.

Einen Einblick darin gewinnen, wie wir im HULC lab Sprachen experimentell miteinander vergleichen – Unterscheiden sich die im Gehirn ablaufenden Verarbeitungsprozesse von Sprache zu Sprache? Inwiefern hängen Sprache und Denken zusammen?

Wissen, wie die Forschung am HULC lab in der Zukunft aussieht - Womit beschäftigen sich Wissenschaftler am HULC lab momentan? Zu welchen Themen kann man am Institut für Deutsch als Fremdsprache und am Institut für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen forschen?

Im Anschluss: BBQ & Bier mit der Fachschaft IDF!

Alle Besucher sind eingeladen, bei einem gemütlichen Grillabend im Hof mit den Wissenschaftlern ins Gespräch zu kommen.

• Veranstaltungsort
• Pressemitteilung zum herunterladen

Programm

16:00-18:00 (IDF und IÜD) - Vorstellung experimenteller Methoden

• Eyetracking I
• Kurze Stimuluspräsentation zur Untersuchung visueller Verarbeitung
• Event Segmentation
• Eyetracking II (Lesen)
• Self-paced - Reading
• Picture-sentence matching task
• Lexical decision task

18:00 -19:00 (IDF, Hörsaal) - Flash Talks - Wissenschaftler stellen ihre Projekte vor

• Alex Gubina – bilinguale Genusprozessierung
• Ziwei Li –morphologische Aspekte der Serial Verb Construction
• Xiaoyu Sun – Verwendungskontexte der Serial Verb Construction
• Michael Herweg – Konzeptuelle Frames
• Ines Marberg – visuelle Informationsverarbeitung in sprachlichen Kontexten
• Sandra Nietzki – ‚subjektive‘ visuelle Aufmerksamkeit
• Johannes Gerwien – Event segmentation
• Inés Recio – Konnektoren
• Martha Rudka – Fokuspartikeln
• Xiaogang Wu – Salienz-Mismatches in der Sprachproduktion

18:30 - 21:00 BBQ + Bier (und andere Getränke)

It is with great pleasure that we announce the First International Workshop “Discourse, Multimodality and Experimental Methods: Discourse Processing using Eye Tracking Technology” to be held in Heidelberg, Germany on October 23rd – 26th, 2017.

The purpose of the workshop is to provide a venue for novice researchers (PhD students and junior researchers) to promote the exchange of ideas on the theoretical and epistemological foundations of empirical approaches in Linguistics and Psycholinguistics, as well as on the latest developments regarding the cognitive processes involved during discourse comprehension and production.

The event will be organized around a series of lectures and practical workshops offered by renown and experienced researchers in the following areas:

a.    Discourse Markers
b.    Multimodality
c.    Discourse Processing Models
d.    First and Second Language Acquisition
e.    Experiment Design and Statistics

All workshops and lectures will be offered in English.

For more detailed information, see the workshop's homepage.

Lab members present current work. All presentations are open to the public!

when? Fri July 28th, 11:00 - 16:00

where? IDF, room 011

Program:

11:00 - 13:00: Presentations Part I

• Qili WANG: Darstellung und Konzeptualisierung von Bewegungsereignissen bei deutsch-chinesischen bilingualen Kindern
• Nina DUMRUKCIC: Cognitive Consequences of Translanguaging
• Xiaogang WU: Top-Down oder Bottom-up: Diskurssalienz versus visuelle Salienz

13:00 - 14:00: Lunch break

14:00 - 16:00: Presentations Part II

• Johannes GERWIEN: Struktur und Qualität – Zwei Ebenen der Spezifizierung in kausativen Ereignisrepräsentationen und ihre kognitive Realität
• Michael HERWEG: Profiles of motion events. Impressions from a stroll through semantic variety
• Elisa GARCÍA NARVÁEZ: Research group “Discourse particles and cognition”: Members, projects and current status of research

Inés Recio will present a joint work on causal multimodal relations with Giovanni Parodi and Cristóbal Julio, researchers at the Language & Cognition Lab of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile). Laura Nadal will deliver a talk on an experimental study on the Spanish connective sin embargo.

More information on the 5th Conference „Discourse Markers in Romance Languages“ in Louvain-la Neuve (Belgium) can be found here.

Am 30. November ab 16 Uhr c.t. veranstaltet das Heidelberg University Language and Cognition lab einen Tag der offenen Tür. An diesem Tag stellen wir das psycholinguistische Labor der Universität Heidelberg vor. Studenten, Freunde und Interessierte sind herzlich eingeladen, Wissenschaftlern über die Schulter zu schauen, die sich damit beschäftigen, wie Menschen Sprache verstehen, produzieren und erlernen.

Der Lab Day soll ein Tag der Aha-Erlebnisse sein. Wissenschaftler am HULC Lab werden allen Interessierten veranschaulichen, was die psycholinguistische Forschung untersucht.

Erfahren, wie man Sprache experimentell untersucht - Am Lab Day werden wir zeigen, welche Methoden man verwenden kann, um zu erforschen, was im Kopf eines Menschen geschieht, wenn er Sprache verwendet.

Verstehen, wie Blicke und Aufmerksamkeit zusammenhängen (Eyetracking) - Wir werden genau erklären, wie ein Eyetracker funktioniert und warum wir so ein Gerät in der psycholinguistischen Forschung einsetzen.

Ausprobieren: Als Versuchsperson bei einem psycholinguistischen Experiment mitmachen - Wer Lust hat, kann selbst an vielen verschiedenen Experimenten teilnehmen. Wir werden zwei Eyetracking-Experimente durchführen. Bei dem einen kann man erleben, wie Menschen ihre Augen wirklich bewegen, wenn sie einen Text lesen. Bei dem anderen werden wir zeigen, wie wir herausfinden, was im Kopf passiert, kurz bevor ein Mensch spricht. Außerdem wird es Experimente geben, die veranschaulichen, wie Menschen auf ihren mentalen Wortspeicher zugreifen bzw. wie man sich solch einen Wortspeicher überhaupt vorstellen kann.

Einen Einblick darin gewinnen, wie wir im HULC lab Sprachen experimentell miteinander vergleichen – Unterscheiden sich die im Gehirn ablaufenden Verarbeitungsprozesse von Sprache zu Sprache? Inwiefern hängen Sprache und Denken zusammen?

Wissen, wie die Forschung am HULC lab in der Zukunft aussieht - Womit beschäftigen sich Wissenschaftler am HULC lab momentan? Zu welchen Themen kann man am Institut für Deutsch als Fremdsprache und am Institut für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen forschen?

Veranstaltungsort

Invited speaker Prof. Anita Fetzer (University of Augsburg) at the Centre for Ibero-american Studies: Discourse Connectivity in Context [more]

All presentations are open to the public!

when? Thursday, June 14th, 16:00 - 19:00

where? IDF, room 010

Topics and titles of presentations at the HULC lab Summer Symposium. A detailed programm can be found here.

Motion event representation and encoding

Weights in motion frames

Michael Herweg

Räumliche Konzepte von Bewegungsereignissen in L2 Deutschen-Chinesischen und L2 Deutschen-Englischen

Can ZHANG

Complex Mandarin motion event descriptions are not serializations of verbs: evidence against the equipollently-framed view

Ziwei Li

Discourse

Expectation management in online dialogue understanding: an investigation of Dutch inderdaad ‘indeed’ and eigenlijk ‘actually’

Guest speaker: Geertje van Bergen (Max-Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik)

Processing marked pragmatic scales with incluso, hasta and even: an eye-tracking study on pragmatic processing in L1 and L2

Iria Bello, Lourdes Torres & Adriana Cruz (DPKog)

Languages use different means to guide inferential processes in communication, which often leads to save cognitive effort in processing (Blakemore 1987, Sperber & Wilson 1995, 2002, Levinson 2000). Focus operators like evendo so by establishing a relation of likelihood within a scale and presenting the focused element as the most informative (Kay 1990, König 1991, Gast & Rzymski 2015), thus contributing to the informative structure of discourse. Building on the debate around whether L1 and L2 speakers can comprehend pragmatic information following similar processing patterns, this study investigates the processing of the focus operator evenin L1 Spanish (incluso, hasta) and L2 English as a unit with procedural meaning. 

Language processing - General

What do we learn from structural priming in bilinguals?

Sandra Pappert

I will present data from structural priming experiments with bilinguals that speak to the issue of (a) separate vs. shared representions and (b) lexical guidance in sentence production. The potential and the limits of the approach will be discussed.

Interpretation and prediction of event participants in Mandarin verb-final sentences – nothing unexpected, but one interesting new finding

Johannes Gerwien

In a visual world study, I show that speakers of Mandarin do not use word order to assign thematic roles. However, prediction effects arise upon perceiving the markers bei and ba, which precede the agent in a passive and the theme/patient in a resultative sentence. Interestingly, an effect of structural complexity of the first noun phrase was observed surfacing as a delay in anticipatory eye movements.

Sind Mutter- und Fremdsprache gleichstark verkörpert? — eine Pupillometrie-Studie über emotionale Reaktivität bei der Verarbeitung mutter- und fremdsprachlicher emotionaler Sätze

Dennis Dieker

Je 20 Probanden in zwei Gruppen lesen Sätze mit negativen, emotionalen und neutralen Inhalten auf Deutsch (Muttersprache) oder auf Englisch (fortgeschrittene Fremdsprache). Gemessen wird die Pupillengrößenveränderung bei der Verarbeitung des emotionalen Inhalts als Indikator über Stärke des sprachlichen embodiment. Hypothesiert wird, dass die Magnitüde der Pupillengrößenveränderung bei der Verarbeitung muttersprachlicher Stimuli größer ist als die bei der Verarbeitung fremdsprachlicher Stimuli. Eine Bestätigung dieser Hypothese nährt theoretische Erkenntnisse über embodiment & grounded cognition an sich (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Barsalou 2008), sowie differentiellem Embodiment (disembodied cognition, Pavlenko 2012).

The research group Discourse Particles and Cognition as part of the HULC Lab presents their research at the Alumni Event of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting. [programme of the event]

Location

This year's Event Semantics Workshop will take place at the Mathematikon at Heidelberg University.

Schedule

Thursday 08-11-2018

Friday 09-11-2018

Saturday 10-11-2018

Abstracts

Specification of methods and the semantics of method-oriented adverbs

Curt Anderson (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)

Much work on the syntax and semantics of adverbs in English, German, and other languages has focused on understanding classes of adverbs such as evaluative adverbs, agent-oriented adverbs, and manner adverbs. One class that has remained understudied is method-oriented adverbs, as described by Schäfer (2013). Method-oriented adverbs are said to specify the method by which some event comes about (examples (1-3)).

(1) The aliens communicated with each other telepathically.

(2) The two nations solved their issues diplomatically.

(3) The semanticist evaluated the data linguistically.

These adverbs are derived from relational adjectives (telepathic, diplomatic, linguistic) and not property adjectives, unlike many manner adverbs. Additionally, they can be distinguished from manner adverbs via syntactic and semantic tests, suggesting that method-oriented adverbs must be given an analysis different from those of manner adverbs.

I clarify the syntactic position of method-oriented adverbs within the clause, and show in what sense these adverbs specify a method. My account is based on a lexical decomposition of the adjective that the adverb is derived from (cf. Anderson & Löbner 2018) and its interaction with the lexical semantics of the modified verb, and makes use of independently motivated primitives for instrumental meaning developed by Koenig et al. (2008).

References

Anderson, Curt & Sebastian Löbner. 2018. Roles and the compositional semantics of role-denoting relational adjectives. In Uli Sauerland & Stephanie Solt (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, vol. 1, 91–108.

Koenig, Jean-Pierre, Gail Mauner, Breton Bienvenue & Kathy Conklin. 2008. What with? the anatomy of a (proto)-role. Journal of Semantics 25(2). 175–220.

Schäfer, Martin. 2013. Positions and interpretations: German adverbial adjectives at the syntax-semantics interface. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Resolving Abstract Anaphors in Discourse — Uphill Battles with Neural Networks and Automatic Data Generation

Anette Frank (University of Heidelberg, Institute for Computional Linguistics)

Abstract anaphora resolution (AAR) is one of the famous Uphill Battle tasks that have been well studied in linguistics without having been solved in a compuational setting. AAR aims to resolve anaphoric expressions that refer to abstract objects such as propositions, events or properties in the (typically) preceding or following discourse. While AAR has been studied extensively in linguistics (Asher 1993), the task is only very recently starting to be addressed in computational linguistics. I will present our ongoing work that is the first to address this task using deep learning methods, drawing from linguistic insights.

In our work we characterize abstract anaphora as establishing a relation between the anaphor embedded in the anaphoric sentence and its (typically non-nominal) antecedent. We present the first neural network-based approach to abstract anaphora resolution that overcomes one of the major obstacles for addressing this task computationally, by automatically deriving training material from parsed corpora (Marasovic et al. 2017). The proposed model defines AAR as a mention ranking model, following the entity coreference model of Clark and Manning 2015. To capture the relation between the abstract anaphor and the antecendent in context, we propose an LSTM-Siamese Network architecture that we extend with an adversarial training method. I will describe how we harvested training data from a parsed corpus using a common syntactic pattern consisting of a verb and an embedded sentential constituent. I will present results obtained with the mention-ranking model trained for different types of abstract anaphors - nominal and pronominal - from different corpora, and in increasingly challenging evaluation setups, to raise this computational modeling task stepwise towards a realistic document-level resolution task.

Predicting referents based on structural meaning – The case of the Mandarin Chinese bǎ-construction

Johannes Gerwien (University of Heidelberg)

The characteristics of the Mandarin Chinese bǎ-construction allow to hypothesize an exceptional processing strategy in event comprehension: Besides other functions, the marker bǎ changes the canonical word order S-V-O to S-bǎ-O-V; it marks the noun to which it belongs as the direct object (cf. Yang & van Bergen 2007), and it signals that the corresponding referent must be interpreted as having changed from one state to another (cf. Li & Thompson 1981). The quality of the referent’s initial and resultant state, however, is specified by the sentence- final verb. Thus, the bǎ-construction offers a unique case to study the online comprehension of structural meaning (temporal and causal relations) independent of content meaning. Can referent states be activated before they are qualitatively specified? While listening people use the current linguistic input to predict upcoming discourse (cf. Altmann & Mirković 2009). We hypothesized that the function word bǎ triggers predictions about the referent following it as an affected object.

In a visual world paradigm, we measured saccade-onset times directed to target objects under 2 conditions: In the critical condition, an auditorily presented target noun followed bǎ, whereas in the control condition it followed de, a possessive marker in our context. This yielded sentence pairs such as tā bǎ xiǎoshuō sī huài le/tā de xiǎoshuō bèi sī huài le (‘He bǎ novel rip apart’ / ‘He de (=His) novel was ripped apart’). The visual stimuli always showed three objects, one of which was unambiguously depicted in a resultant state, e.g., a deformed plastic bottle (see Fig. 1). There were 12 bǎ/de stimulus pairs in total and 12 fillers. 26 Mandarin native speakers participated in the experiment. Two experimental lists ensured that every subject encountered only one pair-partner, 6 from each condition (but all fillers). The participant’s task was to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. Our analyses revealed a reliable effect: There were significantly more pre-noun target-saccades in the critical condition (bǎ) compared to the control condition (de). Furthermore, the cumulative proportions of first target-saccades increased significantly more rapidly.

Results of a second experiment confirm these findings and rule out alternative explanations. Only sentences like those in the critical condition in experiment 1 were used (He bǎ noun ...). The nouns matched a visual target that this time was not depicted in a resultant state. Instead an irrelevant visual resultant-state competitor (torn book) was either present (critical), or not (intact book) (control). Participants looked faster to the target if the resultant- state competitor was not present. In addition, more and longer looks were registered to the competitor in the critical condition than in the control condition. 

These findings suggest that processing bǎ activates an abstract, that is, a qualitatively unspecified representation for an affected object in the comprehender’s situation model. This representation interacts with the visual input, and leads to predictions about the linguistic input. We interpret predictions on the basis of such type of structural information as a special kind of incremental processing which has not been reported previously.

Adverbs of intentionality

Willi Geuder & Katja Gabrovska (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)

Mental-attitude adverbials like English "intentionally" / German "absichtlich" are commonly analysed as predicates of events (e.g. Landman 2000), but usually without discussion of whether they differ from manner adverbs in their relation to the event variable. In this talk, we propose a frame model for representing certain components of intentional action, in particular proposing "action plan" as an attribute of event descriptions. This attribute forms one main branch of event frames, alongside those attributes that can be targeted by manner modifiers. We analyse the German adverb "absichtlich" as stating a matching relation between an action description (including its manners) and an agent's action plan. On the basis of this model, other modifiers from the same lexical field can also be analysed, esp. E. "unintentionally" / G. "versehentlich", as well as the meaning difference between G. "absichtlich" and E. "intentionally".

The processing of grammatical aspect in Polish – new experimental evidence

Dorota Klimek-Jankowska and Joanna Błaszczak (University of Wrocław)

Earlier studies examining the processing of aspect focused mainly on English or German, that is languages in which aspectual information is computed primarily on the basis of lexical aspectual information. Relatively little attention has been paid to the processing of aspect in languages in which aspectual meanings arise from the interaction of grammatical aspect and lexical aspect. In order to fill this gap, we intend to present the results of a series of our experiments: a self-paced reading and a related eye-tracking during reading study and an ERP study on the processing of perfective and imperfective aspect in Polish. The results of these experiments shed a new light on such questions as: (i) what is the domain of aspectual interpretation (V, VP or end of sentence) in languages with grammatical aspect; (ii) what are the neural underpinnings of the process of aspectual mismatch detection and resolution in languages which have a grammatical perfective/imperfective diachotomy?; (iii) is grammatical aspect lexically encoded as part of a verbal lexical entry or is it computed only in morphosyntax?; (iv) Is the semantic specificity asymmetry between imperfective and perfective aspect (imperfective aspect being more underspecified) reflected in the way these aspects are processed?      

Towards a compositional analysis of the an-construction in German

Katja Laptieva (IDS Mannheim), Sebastian Bücking (University of Tuebingen)

In German, some transitive verbs allow their direct object to be expressed as the internal argument of a prepositional phrase headed by an ‘at, on’. In contrast to the transitive structure in (1-a), the an-construction receives an atelic interpretation (Engelberg, 2007). The an-sentence in (1-b) is compatible with a scenario where only a part of a song was created and which does not specify whether the song was finished later on:

It has been usually assumed that the an-construction is a derived structure and that the an-phrase is a partitive variant of the theme argument of a transitive verb (Filip, 1999). That is, the verb meaning and the relationship between the verb and its (prepositional) object were taken to be identical in both argument structures.

There are several arguments against the derivational analysis. First, the an-construction and the transitive structure are not always interchangeable, with the transitive expression being ungrammatical (am Aufstieg basteln ‘try to enter a better league’ vs. *den Aufstieg basteln). Second, obligatory transitive verbs like verzehren ‘consume’ or analysieren ‘analyze’ can not be used in the an-construction (die Banane verzehren ‘consume the banana’ vs. *an der Banane verzehren). Third, the corpus data reveal severe differences in the selectional preferences of the verbs in the two argument structures. For example, the direct object of basteln ‘craft, make’ usually refers to a concrete entity like a mask or a lantern, whereas in the prepositional variant the head noun of the an-phrase mostly denotes an abstract entity like a concept or an idea.

In our approach, we depart from the modeling of the an-phrase as an alternative syntactic realization of the theme argument of the verb. Instead, we analyze the an-phrase as a modifier that combines with the atelic verb variant and introduces a contact relationship between its own internal argument and an entity that is derived by conceptual means from the meaning of the verb.

References

Engelberg, Stefan (2007). ” Konstruktionelle Varianten zwischen Wörterbuch und Grammatik“. In: Germanistische Mitteilungen 66, S. 11–27.

Filip, Hana (1999). Aspect, eventuality types, and nominal reference. Outstanding dissertations in linguistics. New York: Garland Pub.

Act-cascades, TTs, and dot types

Sebastian Löbner (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)

There are two theoretical approaches under discussion that deal with multiple categorization (or type assignment): The theory of "dot objects" / "dot types" (Pustejovsky 2009, Asher 2011) and Cascade Theory (Löbner, under review) based on Goldman's (1970) theory of level-generation. The two approaches share the attempt to deal with things of apparently multiple types (or categories), where the dot object approach was mainly applied to types of objects, and Goldman's and cascade theory to verbs and types of events. Still, the relationship between the two approaches is quite unclear. I will argue in this talk that there are close connections of cascade theory to dot type theory and that cascade theory may help to clarify certain foundational questions of the dot type approach, such as: (i) some of the ontological questions connected to it and (ii) the relationship between the types that belong to one dot type. It will not be claimed that all phenomena to which the dot object approach was applied can be captured by Cascade Theory, but some can – if cascade theory is properly extended as to apply to objects and events in general. One principal point of departure is the proposal recently brought forward for act cascades in Löbner (under review) to consider both theories as concerning not just ontological entities as such, but ontological entities-as-tokens-of-a-type, "TTs" for short. This is a step that is quite natural for semantic analysis since, whenever we talk about "things in the world" we talk of them as things-under-a-given-type-description: the words we use for referring to things and the contextual knowledge about the situation of utterance inevitable provide a type description / categorization of the things we refer to. Realizing this fundamental fact about language (as well as, more generally, about cognition) helps to overcome certain confusion concerning the ontology of dot objects or cascades (act-trees): the question whether we are dealing in such cases with one or more objects can be resolved straightforwardly if we relate it to TTs rather than just bare objects.

References 

Asher, Nicholas (2011). Lexical Meaning in Context: A Web of Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Bücking, Sebastian (2014). 'Elaborating on events by means of English by and German indem.' In Christopher Piñón (ed.), Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 10. pp. 19-36, http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/eiss10/ 

Goldman, Alvin I. (1970). Theory of human action. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. 

Löbner, Sebastian (under review). 'Cascades. Goldman's level-generation, multilevel categorization of action, and multilevel verb semantics.' https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/2Y4YjdkM/ 

Pustejovsky, James (2009). 'The semantics of lexical underspecification.' Folia Linguistica, 32(3-4), 323–348. https://doi:10.1515/flin.1998.32.3-4.323

Unmögliche Interpolationen

Martin Schäfer (Universität Tübingen)

Parallelen zwischen Modifikation im Nominalbereich und Modifikation im Verbalbereich spielen eine prominente Rolle in derEreignissemantik. Mismatches zwischen diesen Bereichen spielen dagegen eine geringere Rolle. Bücking & Maienborn (in Begutachtung) werfen die Frage auf, warum die Interpretation von 'eine schnelle Zigarette' als 'eine schnell gerauchte/gedrehte Zigarette' durch die Interpolation eines Ereignisses möglich ist, gleiches aber in prädikativer Verwendung ausgeschlossen ist ('?Die Zigarette war schnell'). In meinem Vortrag möchte ich erstens einen Überblick über die entsprechende Datenlage im Englischen geben, und zweitens unterschiedliche Erklärungsansätze diskutieren.

References

Bücking, S. & Maienborn, C. (in Begutachtung). Coercion by modification - The  adaptive capacities of event-sensitive adnominal modifiers.

Event Unit Formation

Christiane von Stutterheim & Johannes Gerwien (Heidelberg University)

Events are fundamental units in human perception and cognition. The definition of what event units are varies across disciplines. A core criterion is related to the fact of ‘quality change over time’. This criterion, however, leaves room for variation across the dimensions of quality as well as time. Both dimensions are involved in what has been called ‘level of granularity’. While earlier studies on event unit formation have shown that subjects select different levels of granularity when segmenting the continuous stream of perception (Newtson’s experimental work 1973, Zacks & Radvansky 2014) it still is not clear which criteria subjects draw on, when forming event units. In the presentation we will argue for the hypothesis that language is a major factor in event unit formation. Languages differ with respect to the conceptual categories to which they attribute cognitive prominence on the basis of either grammaticalization or lexical differentiation. A language which requires obligatory marking of phases of an event by aspectual verbal categories, for example, forces its speakers to attend to these differences. A language which differentiates object specific features in the verbal lexicon of position verbs (sitzen, stehen, liegen) forces its speakers to attend to features of a visual input which provide the basis for selecting the respective verb. Cognitive processes which are motivated by linguistic structure in this sense are highly automatized, deeply entrenched in the course of first language acquisition.  

Earlier cross linguistic studies on event construal and verbal representation of events have shown that speakers of different languages a) segment visual input at different break points into  event  units  and  b)  select  different  components  of  the  visual  input  for  verbal representation (v. Stutterheim et al. 2012) So far these two aspects of event construal have not been investigated in their interrelation. A situation in the world is complex, in that different quality changes can take place at a given time interval, such as a leaf which is falling and rotating at the same time or a person who is walking and approaching a goal (Bennett 2002). In order to form an event unit an observer has to select a layer of the complex composition of different qualities which entails the relevant criteria for identifying break points. This is where language comes into play.  Experimental cross linguistic studies in the domain of motion events are taken as evidence for the role of the linguistically packaged conceptual categories in event unit formation. Results will be presented from both verbal and non-verbal tasks. Speakers of four languages which vary with respect to typological features in the domains of spatial and temporal cognition (French, Tunisian, German and English) saw short real world video clips. In one experiment they  were  asked  to  segment  the  input  non-verbally  (button-press-method),  in  a  second experiment they were asked to verbalise the scenes. Our hypothesis is supported by two findings: a) the cross linguistic differences found in segmentation  patterns  converge across  the  verbal  and  the  non-verbal task. b) The cross linguistic differences in the selection of information representing the scenes correspond to typological differences at the level of grammaticalization and lexicalization patterns. Speakers select different layers of the scenes depicted for forming event units.   

In conclusion the findings will be discussed in the context of theories of event cognition  
focusing on the role of language.

References

Bennett, Jonathan (2002): What events are. The Blackwell guide to metaphysics 43-65.

Newtson, Darren (1973): Attribution and the unit of perception of ongoing behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28, 28.

Radvansky, Gabriel A/Zacks, Jeffrey M (2014): Event cognition. Oxford University Press.  

Stutterheim, Christiane von/Andermann, Martin/Carroll, Mary/Flecken, Monique/Schmiedtová, Barbara (2012): How  grammaticized  concepts  shape  event  conceptualization  in  language  production:  Insights  from linguistic analysis, eye tracking data, and memory performance. Linguistics, 50, 833-867.

German wie-complements: Manners, methods and events in progress

Carla Umbach (Leibniz Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft / Universität Köln) 

In German, complement clauses embedded by the wh-word 'wie' ('how'/'like') have two different readings. The first one is a manner reading expressing a manner or method of doing something. The second reading is called "eventive" in the talk because it expresses an event in progress instead of a manner. Assuming that the 'wie' ('how'/'like') in the two readings is the same word, the question arises of why use a manner word to express an event in progress. 

The basic semantic hypothesis in the paper is that the wh-word 'wie' expresses similarity (as it does in e.g., similes). The paper starts from the observation that in the manner reading 'wie' has a base position next to the verb and is a modifier of the event type. In the eventive reading, on the other hand, it has a position above VP thereby adding information about the event token. The analysis includes two components: First, manners are considered as sets of similar events (instead of primitive objects). Methods, in particular, are considered as sets of similar sequences of subevents. Secondly, events in progress are seen as initial sequences which have a set of similar sequences as their continuations. From this point of view, an event in progress is structurally equivalent to a method built from sequences of subevents that share the same initial part. 

This analysis provides a semantic interpretation explaining the common role of the wh-word 'wie' in the two readings.

The (early) availability of future and perfect information in verbal clusters: Implications for the compositional semantics of composite tenses

Dennis Wegner, Marcel Schlechtweg & Holden Härtl (U Wuppertal / U Kassel)

German exhibits two configurations in which the canonical clause-final positioning of a finite element in embedded clauses may be disrupted: verbal clusters headed by future werden and perfect haben (dass Max den Vogel wird/hat singen hören). This correlation suggests that temporal auxiliaries may be preposed in order to reduce the processing load of a computationally challenging verbal structure by virtue of providing the relevant items as early as possible. The present paper discusses this hypothesis against the backdrop of evidence gained from a reading-time study which investigates the consequences of preposing for processing on the basis of a reaction-time-based forced-choice task. While the temporal relevance of the future auxiliary is trivial, our data show that something similar holds for the perfect auxiliary. In fact, the perfect auxiliary haben is bound to introduce relevant perfect semantics unless the auxiliar autonomously expresses perfectivity, which is restricted to predicates that exhibit specific event-structural properties and in turn gives rise to the sein-perfect.

Am 06. Dezember ab 16 Uhr c.t. veranstaltet das Heidelberg University Language and Cognition lab einen Tag der offenen Tür. An diesem Tag stellen wir das psycholinguistische Labor der Universität Heidelberg vor. Studenten, Freunde und Interessierte sind herzlich eingeladen, Wissenschaftlern über die Schulter zu schauen, die sich damit beschäftigen, wie Menschen Sprache verstehen, produzieren und erlernen.

Der Lab Day soll ein Tag der Aha-Erlebnisse sein. Wissenschaftler am HULC Lab werden allen Interessierten veranschaulichen, was die psycholinguistische Forschung untersucht.

Erfahren, wie man Sprache experimentell untersucht - Am Lab Day werden wir zeigen, welche Methoden man verwenden kann, um zu erforschen, was im Kopf eines Menschen geschieht, wenn er Sprache verwendet.

Verstehen, wie Blicke und Aufmerksamkeit zusammenhängen (Eyetracking) - Wir werden genau erklären, wie ein Eyetracker funktioniert und warum wir so ein Gerät in der psycholinguistischen Forschung einsetzen.

Ausprobieren: Als Versuchsperson bei einem psycholinguistischen Experiment mitmachen - Wer Lust hat, kann selbst an vielen verschiedenen Experimenten teilnehmen. Wir werden zwei Eyetracking-Experimente durchführen. Bei dem einen kann man erleben, wie Menschen ihre Augen wirklich bewegen, wenn sie einen Text lesen. Bei dem anderen werden wir zeigen, wie wir herausfinden, was im Kopf passiert, kurz bevor ein Mensch spricht. Außerdem wird es Experimente geben, die veranschaulichen, wie Menschen auf ihren mentalen Wortspeicher zugreifen bzw. wie man sich solch einen Wortspeicher überhaupt vorstellen kann.

Einen Einblick darin gewinnen, wie wir im HULC lab Sprachen experimentell miteinander vergleichen – Unterscheiden sich die im Gehirn ablaufenden Verarbeitungsprozesse von Sprache zu Sprache? Inwiefern hängen Sprache und Denken zusammen?

Wissen, wie die Forschung am HULC lab in der Zukunft aussieht - Womit beschäftigen sich Wissenschaftler am HULC lab momentan? Zu welchen Themen kann man am Institut für Deutsch als Fremdsprache und am Institut für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen forschen?

Programm und detaillierte Informationen werden bald bekanntgegeben.

Visiting guest: Zuzanna Fuchs (Harvard University, PhD student) will be at the HULC Lab from 28/1 - 3/2. Her research concentrates on heritage speakers of Spanish and Polish and whether they are able to use gender on pre-nominal modifiers predictively, and whether this ability is dependent on the presence or absence of grammatical gender in their dominant language.

Zuzanna Fuchs will present her work on friday, february 1, at 9 a.m. at the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (room 009).

Abstract:
Predictive use of gender in eye-tracking: asymmetries between Heritage Spanish and Heritage Polish
Because heritage languages are acquired under reduced input, they offer an exciting window onto the acquisition and structures of language. By comparing heritage languages to each other, we can identify recurrent properties, as well as microvariation, that allow us to deeper investigate various issues in syntax and thus to refine our theoretical understanding of syntactic structures. In this talk, I will compare evidence from eye-tracking investigations of Heritage Spanish and Heritage Polish to ask what heritage speakers know about grammatical gender and how they can use it in online tasks. The results show that heritage speakers of both languages can use grammatical gender on prenominal material to make predictions about subsequent nouns. However, in Polish, certain asymmetries in which gender is used more effectively to make such predictions lend insight into the internal structure of the gender feature. In addition, while heritage speakers of Spanish (which has two genders) perform consistently slower than the monolingual Spanish control population, heritage speakers of Polish (which has three genders) perform on par with the Polish control population. This is the opposite of what we would expect if the characteristics of the gender feature in the heritage language affected heritage speaker ability to maintain predictive use of gender, leaving open the question of what factors do play a role in this process.  

During her stay at the HULC Lab Zuzanna Fuchs is looking for participants for her study. Contact her if you match the profile:

Who: Adults 18+ years of age, who grew up speaking Spanish or Polish, who grew up in Germany, Poland, or any Spanish-speaking country. Any level of proficiency in Spanish or Polish is welcome!

When/where: The study will be conducted at the University of Heidelberg Jan 28 - Feb 3, and at the Goethe University Frankfurt (Unicampus Westend) Feb 4 - Feb 15. The study lasts 45 minutes, and participants will receive 20 euro to compensate for their time and travel expenses. Appointments are available from 8.00 in the morning to 21.00 in the evening.

The study: This is an eye-tracking study, during which participants will listen to questions (in Spanish or Polish, depending on the participants' language) and look at images on a screen while a camera records their eye movements. Participants will also be asked to fill out a brief questionnaire (in German, English, Spanish, or Polish) regarding their language background.

Contact: Please email Zuzanna Fuchs at zuzannafuchs@fas.harvard.edu to schedule a time to come to the lab. Zuzanna is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University. The results of this study will be the core of her dissertation. You can read more about Zuzanna and her work here [in Polish] or on her personal website [in English]

All presentations are open to the public!

when? Thursday, June 14th, 13:00 - 17:00

where? IÜD, room 019

Topics and titles of presentations at the HULC lab Summer Symposium.

Wie schafft es der Mensch, seine Gedanken in Sprache zu fassen? Wie funktioniert Lesen? Wie erwerben Kinder eine Sprache und wie lernen Erwachsene eine Fremdsprache? Mit diesen und vielen weiteren Fragen beschäftigt sich die Psycholinguistik.

Das Heidelberg University Language and Cognition Lab (HULC lab) ist der Ort an dem Wissenschaftler_innen der Universität Heidelberg ihre  Forschung im Bereich der Psycholinguistik durchführen.

Beim Open Lab Day stellt das HULC lab einige seiner Forschungsthemen und Forschungsmethoden vor. Es handelt sich dabei um eine virtuelle Veranstaltung, an der man bequem von zu Hause aus am Computer teilnehmen kann. Es wird kurze Präsentationen geben und wer Lust hat, kann mit den Forschenden direkt in Kontakt treten und Fragen stellen.

Wenn Sie in Erwägung ziehen, an die Uni Heidelberg zu kommen, um ein Studium aufzunehmen, oder wenn Sie bereits an der Uni Heidelberg eingeschrieben sind, in Bezug auf Ihre Studienausrichtung aber noch unentschieden sind, dann ist der Open Lab Day eine Möglichkeit, sich über einen interessanten Forschungsbereich zu informieren.

Parallel zum Open Lab Day findet eine virtuelle Studienberatung statt, bei der man sich über das Studium am Institut für Deutsch als Fremdsprachenphilologie informieren kann.

Einige der Themen, um die es beim Open Lab Day gehen wird:

• Sprachproduktions- und Sprachverstehensforschung
• Leseforschung
• Sprachentwicklungsstörungen
• Erst- und Fremdspracherwerb
• Der Zusammenhang zwischen Sprache und Denken
• Bilingualismus
• Eyetracking und Reaktionszeitmessung
• Und vieles mehr …

Außerdem kann man Experimente ausprobieren.

Der Open Lab Day findet am 17. Februar zwischen 15:00 und 18:00 (CET) auf der Event-Plattform ohyay statt. Der folgende Link führt direkt dorthin.

https://ohyay.co/s/hulc

Alle gängigen Browser sollten funktionieren. Ausprobiert haben wir Firefox, Chrome und Safari.

Falls Sie die Plattform nicht betreten können, versuchen Sie am besten einen VPN-Client.