Presentational/Existential Structures in Spoken versus Written German: Es Gibt and SEIN

This article presents a synchronic, corpus-based examination of spoken German with regard to the distribution and function of presentational/ existential es gibt NP and a range of SEIN NP structures such as da SEIN , locative SEIN , es SEIN , and zero-locative SEIN . In particular, the use of da SEIN has been neglected in previous research. While es gibt is equally frequent in the spoken and written data, SEIN structures are typical of spoken German only, with da SEIN being the most frequent. The article concentrates on clauses with indefinite NPs, while the presentation of events with da and wider da-usage in spoken German are also considered

Object-based selection of irrelevant features is not confined to the attended object

Attention to one feature of an object can bias the processing of unattended features of that object. Here we demonstrate with ERPs in visual search that this object-based bias for an irrelevant feature also appears in an unattended object when it shares that feature with the target object. Specifically, we show that the ERP response elicited by a distractor object in one visual field is modulated as a function of whether a task-irrelevant color of that distractor is also present in the target object that is presented in the opposite visual field. Importantly, we find this modulation to arise with a delay of approximately 80 msec relative to the N2pc-a component of the ERP response that reflects the focusing of attention onto the target. In a second experiment, we demonstrate that this modulation reflects enhanced neural processing in the unattended object. These observations together facilitate the surprising conclusion that the object-based selection of irrelevant features is spatially global even after attention has selected the target object