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See here our datamanagementplans and public data for the several projects or subprojects.
The template for our datamangementplan is now available online: https://osf.io/f9dqk/
This project investigates the multilingual setting of an urban street market, where speakers routinely draw on a large range of linguistic resources. So far, research on such settings has focused on their characteristic diversity and fluidity. In contrast, our investigation will target stability; it will be led by the hypothesis that the observable and sometimes outwardly chaotic variability is not a matter of ‘anything goes’, but might rather be delimitated by systematic patterns and restrictions. In order to capture this great variability and its constraints, we combine ethnographical and sociolinguistic methods with grammatical analyses and theoretical linguistic modelling.
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This project seeks to explore the dimensions of syntactic variability from a diachronic perspective. We will combine corpus study and psycholinguistic experimentation to investigate how language processing strategies might affect speakers' choices of particular syntactic variants. The extraordinary abundance of syntactic variants in Early New High German, which gradually became more constrained during the emergence of present-day Standard German, will provide a suitable empirical basis for this. The project will focus on the emergence of coherent infinitival structures.
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Language in social media is characterised by more formal (written) or more informal (spoken-like) style in different contexts, and thus shows high variability. We focus on one linguistic domain in Pragmatics, the management of common ground between writers and readers, and identify the consistent patterns of discourse strategies employed by writers across different groups and channels. We will develop computational models for the observed variability across individuals, groups, and social media channels supplementing a consistent core. The models test and if appropriate extend theories like Centering and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory.
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This project investigates the limits of intra- and inter-individual variability in comprehending and producing prosodic cues in structurally ambiguous sentences or utterances. We aim to characterize in more depth the internal organization of the prosody-syntax-interface as part of the mental grammar and to specify neuro-cognitive models of prosody processing. To maximally bring to light the limits of variability at the prosody-syntax-interface, the project targets prosodic cue processing across a wide range of listeners and speakers (young and elderly adults, participants with acquired lesions in the left or right hemisphere of the brain), using various ambiguous structures, and comparing prosody-syntax processing across variable task demands.
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This project aims to identify the constraints that determine sentence comprehension difficulty in healthy and aphasic participants; we will focus on understanding the sources of inter- and intra-individual variability and stability in performance. We will use both computational modelling and experimental research to achieve these goals. A longer-term goal is to investigate whether and to what extent aphasic patients can benefit from our empirical and modelling work through the development of impairment-specific treatment protocols.
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This project aims to develop mathematical/computational models to investigate how eye movements and natural language parsing processes influence and interact with each other. Based on novel experimental designs and an integrated modeling approach, we will seek to explain how the dynamical interaction of subprocesses (vision, attention, parsing, sensorimotor control) generates the observed variability in language processing between and within participants under varying task demands.
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This project examines how Turkish/German bilingual speakers’ processing of sentences and morphologically complex words is influenced by grammatical vs non-grammatical constraints. We specifically investigate two important sources for inter-individual variability in bilinguals: age of acquisition and amount of exposure and practice. We also determine the range of intra-individual variability in bilinguals’ performance across different processing tasks and modalities. The project aims to develop a model that accounts both for linguistic choices which are subject to variability and for those which are consistent and robust in bilingual language processing.
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The aim of this project is to refine current psycholinguistic models of word production by integrating precise information about the dynamics of encoding processes (i.e. grammatical, phonological, and phonetic encoding), about the constraints that operate to limit the variability of these processes (i.e. speaker-specific variables and contextual factors) and about how the linguistic system interacts with other cognitive functions during actual speech production. It addresses this goal by examining and modelling inter-speaker and intra-speaker variability and their limits in the timing of word production processes using time course data (Electroencephalography and eye movements).
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The project studies the effects of repeated exposure (training) to unfamiliar/ unacceptable constructions on language production and the perception of grammaticality. We hypothesise that the production probability and acceptability of constructions that are unacceptable in a particular speaker's variety can be increased by training, but only for those structures that are licensed by the overall grammatical system of the language since they figure in other varieties. To this end, we will focus on the development of an adequate training technique.
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The project studies interpretive adaptation processes employed by language users in order to ensure communicative success (felicity, truth) in the face of difficulties in discourse. In a series of offline experiments, we will identify variability and consistency in the interpretation of relative scope, bare SG object NPs, definite descriptions and counterfactuals across individual utterances, speakers, and languages (German, English, Akan). The focus lies on identifying adaptation processes that (i.) are systematically blocked across speakers and trials; (ii.) require structural reanalysis; and/or (iii.) show cross-linguistic variability. Such cases shed light on the underlying linguistic systems of individual languages and the workings of the syntax-semantics interface.
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This project investigates effects of variable input on the establishment of phonological word representations in first language acquisition. Experiments with 14-month-old children will study word learning under different conditions of variability testing the hypothesis that only specific types of variability foster the recognition of phonologically relevant acoustic dimensions in the speech signal. Stimuli will be used that a) follow or violate relations of covariability between different phonetic dimensions as observed in natural language and that b) provide or do not provide informative phonetically variable contexts. Measurements of pupil dilation and eye movement patterns during word processing will be obtained.
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This project characterises variability in its chosen domain (phonology, phonetics, syllabic structure) and contributes models which harness variability to identify linguistic structure in phonetic data. The linguistic organization in focus is that of syllables. Syllables are fundamental units of spoken language, mediating between lower-level properties of individual sounds and higher prosody. Recent work indicates that stability patterns of certain intervals, defined over sequences of consonants and vowels, are the phonetic (physical) correlates of distinct syllabic structures. This project examines how consistently interval-based phonetic measures express differences between distinct syllabic structures. We do so by considering the effects of variability in the same syllabic organizations across languages as well as the effect of variability on different syllabic organizations within the same language. Finally, we extend current computational modelling methods for the identification of syllabic structure in phonetic data by endowing them with information about how variability in a number of different factors influences interval-based phonetic measures of syllabic organizations.
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The project studies displacement asymmetries from a cross-linguistic perspective. Subject displacement is more restricted than object displacement in that the former requires special morphological devices in many languages. The goal is to find out what underlies this constraint on displacement in the mental grammar and which features need to co-occur in a language to trigger the asymmetry. To this end, we focus on the comparatively little studied phenomenon of agreement-suppression (AS). Cross-linguistic patterns of variability and stability in AS, identified in a questionnaire study, enable us to determine (i) whether AS is in fact another instance of a general restriction against subject extraction and (ii) what causes this restriction.
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This project will provide support to the CRC by (a) advising other projects on experiment design, (b) helping projects to preregister their primary statistical analyses using the Open Science Foundation (https://osf.io/), (c) providing training in carrying out these analyses, and (d) helping with the post-publication data management and archiving for use in the public domain. This will be achieved through four work packages that (1) provide support to the CRC for optimising experiment design and analysis, (2) provide statistical education within the CRC, (3) assist in developing and maintaining a data repository to ensure preregistration, open access of data and code, and reproducibility, and (4) develop new statistical methods and computational tools, and software packages needed for the CRC, which will be provided for the public domain.
Public data:
University of Potsdam
SFB1287
Prof. Dr. Isabell Wartenburger
Campus Golm
Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24-25
14476 Potsdam
Tel.: (+49) 331 977-2928
Fax: (+49) 331-977-2095