Focus and thematic role assignment: A comparison of Hungarian and German in Child Language Comprehension
Final Report Abstract
This project carried out studies on the role of prosody and visual cues in sentence comprehension in German and Hungarian. Previous research had shown that initial foci reduce the subject-first bias in languages such as German and Italian, but not so in Hungarian. The studies of this project relativized the role of prosody and shed light on cross-linguistic aspects and on the role of visual cues for thematic role assignment. The key insights from the studies on German are: In a flexible word-order language with some case ambiguity (German), a clear SVO bias emerged. - Case-marking rapidly disambiguated temporary ambiguity in German NP-V-NP sentences for young adults’ thematic role assignment. - Prosody did not have a clear effect on thematic role assignment in German children and young adults, - The failure to find such intonation effects may be attributable to differences in visual context compared with prior research, - Visual cues (a wiggling character and the short-lived presentation of action-tool depictions) rapidly modulated listener’s incremental thematic role assignment. - Developmental differences emerged in case-marking effects on thematic role assignment between 4-5-year-old children and young adults. - Extant accounts (the Coordinated Interplay Account) have been extended to include factors such as a comprehender’s age and its modulation of situated language comprehension. The experimental studies on Hungarian generally confirmed the view that cue reliability/availability is a key to understanding cross-linguistic differences in cue strength. The key scientific insights are summarized in the following: In a language with a highly transparent inflectional system, case is a strong cue for thematicrole assignment. - Even word order biases (subject-first) do not apply in the presence of morphological case. - Overt case has a stronger effect on visual search for competitors than zero-marked case. - Prosodic prominence has an effect on attracting attention and enhancing the effects of the morphosyntactic cues. - There is no evidence for an inference from information structure to thematic role assignment, although corpus frequencies indicate a reduction of the subject-first bias with initial foci in discourse. The fact that this asymmetry in frequency is not reflected in sentence comprehension suggests that pragmatic inferences do not arise at all in the presence of stronger cues. The major changes in the project plan were due to the fact that the object languages were not as different as expected (based on the findings reported in previous research). Hence, the developmental hypotheses were examined in the German studies, while the studies on Hungarian focused on examining the structural and discourse determinants of thematic role assignment.
Publications
- (2016). Characterising visual context effects: Active, pervasive, but resourcelimited. In: P. Knoeferle, P. Pykkönnen-Klauch, & M. W. Crocker (Eds.). Visually situated language comprehension (pp. 227-260). Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Knoeferle, P.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1075/aicr.93.09kno) - (2017). The influence of prosody and case marking on thematic role assignment in ambiguous action scenes: adults versus children. In: Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2463-2468). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society
Kröger, J., Münster, K., & Knoeferle, P.
- (2018). Effects of a speaker’s gaze on language comprehension and acquisition. In: Geert Brône and Bert Oben (Eds.) Eye-tracking in interaction: Studies on the role of eye-gaze in dialogue. (pp. 47-66). John Benjamins
Knoeferle, P., Kreysa, H., & Pickering, M.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1075/ais.10.03kno) - (2018). Eye Tracking during visually situated language comprehension: flexibility and limitations in uncovering visual context effects. Journal of Visualized Experiments, 141, e57694
Rodriguez-Ronderos, C., Münster, K., Guerra, E., Kreysa, H., Rodriguez, A., Kröger, J., Kluth, T., Burigo, M., Abashidze, D., Nunnemann, N., & Knoeferle, P.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3791/57694) - (2018). Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle: How visual cues influence thematic role assignment in children and adults. In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1969-1974), Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society
Kröger, J., Münster, K., Burigo, M., & Knoeferle, P.
- (2019). Real-time thematic role assignment in children and adults. The influence of case-marking, prosody, and visual cues
Kröger, J. M.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.4119/unibi/2936107)
