Quotation marks in advanced language acquisition: A reading time experiment on English pure quotation

Quotation marks represent a well-known tool to refer to something in a metalinguistic way. For instance, in the sentence “Gold” is a concrete noun, we focus on a linguistic property of the noun gold rather than, or at least in addition to, its standard denotation, which is, in turn, referred to in a sentence like Gold is a strong metal. While the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of quotation in general and quotation marks in particular are relatively well understood, we know much less about whether and how one uses, processes, and acquires these marks. The present article aims at connecting to and expanding previous research on the perception and production of quotation marks and concentrates on the role quotation marks play in the detection of English pure quotation in advanced readers. We show that quotation marks are relevant in advanced language acquisition, and that individuals benefit from the marks when being exposed to quotational constructions

L1 variation and L2 acquisition: L1 German /eː/-/ɛː/ overlap and its effect on the acquisition of L2 English /ɛ/-/æ/

A person’s first language (L1) affects the way they acquire speech in a second language (L2). However, we know relatively little about the role different varieties of the L1 play in the acquisition of L2 speech. This study focuses on German (L1) learners of English (L2) and asks whether the degree to which German speakers distinguish between the two vowels /eː/ and /ɛː/ in their L1 has an impact on how well these individuals identify /æ/ and discriminate between the two English vowels /ɛ/ and /æ/. These two English vowels differ in both vowel quality and duration (/æ/ is longer than /ɛ/). We report on an identification and a discrimination experiment. In the first study, participants heard a sound file and were asked to indicate whether they heard “pen” or “pan” (or “pedal” or “paddle”). The stimuli differed from each other in terms of both vowel quality (11 steps on a spectral continuum from an extreme /æ/ to an extreme /ɛ/) and duration (short, middle, long). In the second study, participants had to signal whether two sound files they were exposed to differed from each other. We modeled the percentage of /æ/ (“pan,” “paddle”) selection (identification task only, binomial logistic regression), accuracy (discrimination task only, binomial logistic regression), and reaction time (identification and discrimination tasks, linear mixed effects models) by implementing the German Pillai score as a measure of vowel overlap in our analysis. Each participant has an individual Pillai score, which ranges from 0 (= merger of L1 German /eː/ and /ɛː/) to 1 (=maintenance of the contrast between L1 German /eː/ and /ɛː/) and had been established, prior to the perception experiments reported here, in a production study. Although the findings from the discrimination study remain inconclusive, the results from the identification test support the hypothesis that maintaining the vowel contrast in the L1 German leads to a more native-like identification of /æ/ in L2 English. We conclude that sociolinguistic variation in someone’s L1 can affect L2 acquisition

Do We Pronounce Quotation? An Analysis of Name-informing and Non-name-informing Contexts

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFGgeförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich. This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively

Memorization and the morphology-syntax divide: A cross-linguistic investigation

Punliziert im "Special Issue: Selected papers from the Word-Formation Theories conference, Košice, 26-28 June, 2015. Guest editors: Aleksandra Bagasheva and Jesús Fernández-Dominguez

The lexicalization of complex constructions: an analysis of adjective-noun combinations

Online-Proceedings of the 10th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting (MMM10), Haifa (Israel), September 7-9, 2015

Magic Pages -- Providing Added Value to Electronic Documents

Most electronic documents have a predefined structure, and a visualization of a document is adjusted to this structure. In many cases, however, it is desirable to have different visual representations of the document. This becomes especially important if there is additional information available, for instance, annotations. This paper introduces Magic Pages, a user interface technique that supports different views onto an electronic document. Support in this case means to provide an intuitive way of handling the visualization of textual content as well as additional information. Magic Pages are designed based on the user's experience with the handling of paper documents and treat different views as transparent pages set atop the original text

The duration of word-final s in English: A comparison of regular-plural and pluralia-tantum nouns

The alveolar fricative occurs in word-final position in English in different grammatical functions. Nominal suffixes may indicate plurality (e.g. cars), genitive case (e.g. car’s) or plurality and genitive case in cumulation (e.g. cars’). Further, there are the third person singular verbal suffix (e.g. she fears) and the cliticized forms of the third person singular forms of have and be (e.g. she’s been lucky; she’s friendly). There is also non-affixal s (e.g. freeze (noun)). Against the standard view that all these types are homophonous, several empirical studies have shown that at least some of the fricatives listed can actually be differentiated in their duration. The present article expands this line of research and considers a further case, which has not been included in previous analyses: pluralia-tantum nouns (e.g. goggles). We report on a carefully controlled reading study in which native speakers of British English produced pluralia-tantum and comparable regular-plural nouns (e.g. toggles). The duration of the word-final fricative was measured, and it was found that the two do not systematically differ in this acoustic parameter. The new data are interpreted in comparison to relevant previous studies, and against the background of the similarities of pluralia-tantum and regular-plural nouns