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Herbert Schriefers
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2014) 26 (7): 1428–1444.
Published: 01 July 2014
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Learning the syntax of a second language (L2) often represents a big challenge to L2 learners. Previous research on syntactic processing in L2 has mainly focused on how L2 speakers respond to “objective” syntactic violations, that is, phrases that are incorrect by native standards. In this study, we investigate how L2 learners, in particular those of less than near-native proficiency, process phrases that deviate from their own, “subjective,” and often incorrect syntactic representations, that is, whether they use these subjective and idiosyncratic representations during sentence comprehension. We study this within the domain of grammatical gender in a population of German learners of Dutch, for which systematic errors of grammatical gender are well documented. These L2 learners as well as a control group of Dutch native speakers read Dutch sentences containing gender-marked determiner–noun phrases in which gender agreement was either (objectively) correct or incorrect. Furthermore, the noun targets were selected such that, in a high proportion of nouns, objective and subjective correctness would differ for German learners. The ERP results show a syntactic violation effect (P600) for objective gender agreement violations for native, but not for nonnative speakers. However, when the items were re-sorted for the L2 speakers according to subjective correctness (as assessed offline), the P600 effect emerged as well. Thus, rather than being insensitive to violations of gender agreement, L2 speakers are similarly sensitive as native speakers but base their sensitivity on their subjective—sometimes incorrect—representations.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2011) 23 (9): 2447–2467.
Published: 01 September 2011
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The present study addresses the question whether accentuation and prosodic phrasing can have a similar function, namely, to group words in a sentence together. Participants listened to locally ambiguous sentences containing object- and subject-control verbs while ERPs were measured. In Experiment 1, these sentences contained a prosodic break, which can create a certain syntactic grouping of words, or no prosodic break. At the disambiguation, an N400 effect occurred when the disambiguation was in conflict with the syntactic grouping created by the break. We found a similar N400 effect without the break, indicating that the break did not strengthen an already existing preference. This pattern held for both object- and subject-control items. In Experiment 2, the same sentences contained a break and a pitch accent on the noun following the break. We argue that the pitch accent indicates a broad focus covering two words [see Gussenhoven, C. On the limits of focus projection in English. In P. Bosch & R. van der Sandt (Eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives . Cambridge: University Press, 1999], thus grouping these words together. For object-control items, this was semantically possible, which led to a “good-enough” interpretation of the sentence. Therefore, both sentences were interpreted equally well and the N400 effect found in Experiment 1 was absent. In contrast, for subject-control items, a corresponding grouping of the words was impossible, both semantically and syntactically, leading to processing difficulty in the form of an N400 effect and a late positivity. In conclusion, accentuation can group words together on the level of information structure, leading to either a semantically “good-enough” interpretation or a processing problem when such a semantic interpretation is not possible.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2010) 22 (5): 1036–1053.
Published: 01 May 2010
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This study addresses the question whether prosodic information can affect the choice for a syntactic analysis in auditory sentence processing. We manipulated the prosody (in the form of a prosodic break; PB) of locally ambiguous Dutch sentences to favor one of two interpretations. The experimental items contained two different types of so-called control verbs (subject and object control) in the matrix clause and were syntactically disambiguated by a transitive or by an intransitive verb. In Experiment 1, we established the default off-line preference of the items for a transitive or an intransitive disambiguating verb with a visual and an auditory fragment completion test. The results suggested that subject- and object-control verbs differently affect the syntactic structure that listeners expect. In Experiment 2, we investigated these two types of verbs separately in an on-line ERP study. Consistent with the literature, the PB elicited a closure positive shift. Furthermore, in subject-control items, an N400 effect for intransitive relative to transitive disambiguating verbs was found, both for sentences with and for sentences without a PB. This result suggests that the default preference for subject-control verbs goes in the same direction as the effect of the PB. In object-control items, an N400 effect for intransitive relative to transitive disambiguating verbs was found for sentences with a PB but no effect in the absence of a PB. This indicates that a PB can affect the syntactic analysis that listeners pursue.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2007) 19 (9): 1421–1434.
Published: 01 September 2007
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Speech is structured into parts by syntactic and prosodic breaks. In locally syntactic ambiguous sentences, the detection of a syntactic break necessarily follows detection of a corresponding prosodic break, making an investigation of the immediate interplay of syntactic and prosodic information impossible when studying sentences in isolation. This problem can be solved, however, by embedding sentences in a discourse context that induces the expectation of either the presence or the absence of a syntactic break right at a prosodic break. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were compared to acoustically identical sentences in these different contexts. We found in two experiments that the closure positive shift, an ERP component known to be elicited by prosodic breaks, was reduced in size when a prosodic break was aligned with a syntactic break. These results establish that the brain matches prosodic information against syntactic information immediately.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2002) 14 (6): 951–964.
Published: 15 August 2002
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We present a new technique for studying the activation of semantic and phonological codes in speech planning using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) that extend a well-established behavioral procedure from speech production research. It combines a delayed picture-naming task with a priming procedure. While participants prepared the production of a depicted object's name, they heard an auditory target word. If the prepared picture name and the target word were semantically or phonologically related, the ERP waveform to the target word tended less towards the negative when compared to an unrelated control. These effects were widely distributed. By contrast, if participants performed a nonlinguistic task on the depicted object (natural size judgment), the semantic effect was still obtained while the phonological effect disappeared. This suggests that the former effect indexes semantic activation involved in object processing while the latter effect indexes word-form activation specific to lexical processing. The data are discussed in the context of models of lexical access in speech production.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2000) 12 (4): 556–568.
Published: 01 July 2000
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This experiment explored the effect of semantic expectancy on the processing of grammatical gender, and vice versa, in German using event-related-potentials (ERPs). Subjects were presented with correct sentences and sentences containing an article-noun gender agreement violation. The cloze probability of the nouns was either high or low. ERPs were measured on the nouns. The low-cloze nouns evoked a larger N400 than the high-cloze nouns. Gender violations elicited a left-anterior negativity (LAN, 300-600 msec) for all nouns. An additional P600 component was found only in high-cloze nouns. The N400 was independent of the gender mismatch variable; the LAN was independent of the semantic variable, whereas an interaction of the two variables was found in the P600. This finding indicates that syntactic and semantic processes are autonomous during an early processing stage, whereas these information types interact during a later processing phase.