Verantwortungsdarstellung und Verantwortungswahrnehmung in der 1. Welle der COVID-19-Pandemie: Ein mehrmethodischer Ansatz

Zu Beginn der COVID-19-Pandemie reagierte der Großteil der betroffenen Länder mit Maßnahmen, die das öffentliche Leben weitgehend einschränkten. Gleichzeitig baten Politiker:innen und andere gesellschaftliche Akteur:innen die Menschen, Abstand zu halten und zu Hause zu bleiben. Vor diesem Hintergrund stellt sich die Frage, wer für Ursachen und Lösungen der Pandemie als verantwortlich wahrgenommen wurde. Maßgeblich geprägt wird eine solche Verantwortungswahrnehmung durch deren Darstellung in der medialen Berichterstattung mittels Responsibility Frames. Entsprechend setzt sich der vorliegende Beitrag mit den Responsibility Frames in der Berichterstattung zu COVID-19 sowie der Verantwortungswahrnehmung seitens der Bevölkerung in der ersten Welle der Pandemie in Deutschland auseinander. Zu diesem Zweck wurden eine teilstandardisierte Inhaltsanalyse der Printberichterstattung sowie eine bevölkerungsrepräsentative Online-Panelbefragung im Zeitraum Januar bis Mai 2020 durchgeführt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Medien insbesondere gesellschaftliche Verantwortung hervorhoben, während die Bevölkerung komplexere Verantwortungsattributionen aufwies. Insgesamt aber waren, anders als in der Berichterstattung, individuelle Verantwortungszuschreibungen in der Bevölkerung am stärksten ausgeprägt. Dies ist angesichts der Bedeutung der Verantwortungswahrnehmung für das individuelle Gesundheitsverhalten und die Bereitschaft, politische Maßnahmen zu unterstützen, ein zentraler Befund.At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the affected countries responded with measures that largely restricted public life. At the same time, politicians and other social actors repeatedly asked people to keep their distance and stay at home. Against this backdrop, the question arises as to who was perceived as responsible for causing and fixing the pandemic. Such a perception of responsibility is decisively shaped by its portrayal in media coverage. Accordingly, this article examines the responsibility frames in the reporting on COVID-19 and the perception of responsibility on the part of the population in the first wave of the pandemic in Germany (January to May 2020). For this purpose, a partially standardized content analysis of print coverage and a population-representative online panel survey were conducted. The results indicate that the media mostly emphasized societal responsibilities, while the population showed more complex attributions of responsibility. Overall, however, in contrast to the reporting, attributions of individual responsibility were strongest among the population. This is an important finding, given the importance of the perception of responsibility for individuals’ health behavior and the willingness to support political measures

Morphological processing across the adult lifespan: a tale of gains and losses

Despite increasing research on language in aging, age effects on morphological processing have received comparatively little attention. Some previous evidence suggests that while regular morphology (e.g., walk-walked) may remain relatively stable in older age, irregular morphology (e.g., bring-brought) shows signs of age-related decreases in processing efficiency. However, the underlying reasons for these declines are unclear. The current study sought to investigate the cognitive underpinnings of age-related effects on German noun plurals: default plurals (posited to follow a default rule [e.g., Zebra-Zebras 'zebra(s)']) and predictable and unpredictable non-default plurals (closed class plurals, in which the plural is either phonologically predictable from the singular [e.g., Flasche-Flaschen 'bottle(s)'] or unpredictable [e.g., Nest-Nester 'nest(s)']). In a cross-modal priming experiment, 283 healthy German native speakers (aged 18–91 years) performed lexical decisions on singular nouns which take different types of plural affixes, and which were primed by either their plural form ("morphological condition") or an unrelated noun ("unrelated condition"). Additionally, several cognitive abilities (declarative, procedural, and working memory, interference control, processing speed) were tested to assess their mediating role for morphological processing. The results revealed distinct developmental trajectories for default versus non-default plurals: priming effects (unrelated-morphological condition) for predictable and unpredictable non-default plurals decreased with increasing age, with age-related declines in declarative memory mediating these declines. In contrast, priming effects for default plurals increased with increasing age. Although the reasons for this increase remain to be clarified, we suggest lifelong experience with the computation of these forms as a possible mechanism

Conceptual Number in Bilingual Agreement Computation: Evidence from German Pseudo-Partitives

During subject–verb agreement (SVA) computation, the conceptual or notional number of the subject can affect whether speakers choose a singular or a plural verb, potentially overriding the grammatical number of the subject’s head. The influence of notional number has hardly been investigated in bilinguals, however. Most previous research on bilingual agreement computation has focused on agreement errors, and less is known about agreement computation in cases where multiple licit options exist. One such phenomenon is pseudo-partitives (German: eine Tüte Nüsse ‘one bag of nuts’), for which a verb may agree with either the first or the second noun phrase. We present data from 150 L1 speakers of German and Turkish–German early bilinguals who performed a sentence-completion task. While both groups showed awareness of the optionality in agreement, both preferred the first noun phrase as the agreement controller. Interestingly, notional plurality affected bilinguals’ verb choices more than those of L1 speakers, whose responses were influenced by notional plurality only in the most challenging number conflict condition. We suggest that increased cognitive demands during bilingual SVA computation may render bilinguals more susceptible to conceptual effects

Inflectional complexity and experience affect plural processing in younger and older readers of Dutch and German

<p>According to dual-route models of morphological processing, regular inflections can be retrieved as whole-word forms or decomposed into morphemes. Baayen, Dijkstra, and Schreuder [(1997). Singulars and plurals in Dutch: Evidence for a parallel dual-route model. <i>Journal of Memory and Language</i>, <i>37</i>, 94–117. doi:10.1006/jmla.1997.2509] proposed a dual-route model in which singular-dominant plurals (“brides”) are decomposed, while plural-dominant plurals (“peas”) are accessed as whole-word units. We report two lexical-decision experiments investigating how plural processing is influenced by participants’ age and morphological complexity of the language (German/Dutch). For all Dutch participants and older German participants, we replicated the interaction between number and dominance reported by Baayen and colleagues. Younger German participants showed a main effect of number, indicating decomposition of all plurals. Access to stored forms seems to depend on morphological richness and experience with word forms. The data pattern fits neither full-decomposition nor full-storage models, but is compatible with dual-route models.</p

Verantwortungsdarstellung und Verantwortungswahrnehmung in der 1. Welle der COVID-19-Pandemie: Ein mehrmethodischer Ansatz

Wiedicke A, Rossmann C, Sandrock J, Temmann LJ, Reifegerste D, Koch LE-M. Verantwortungsdarstellung und Verantwortungswahrnehmung in der 1. Welle der COVID-19-Pandemie: Ein mehrmethodischer Ansatz. In: Reifegerste D, Kolip P, Wagner A, eds. Wer macht wen für Gesundheit (und Krankheit) verantwortlich? Beiträge zur Jahrestagung der Fachgruppe Gesundheitskommunikation 2022. Bielefeld: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft e.V; 2023.Zu Beginn der COVID-19-Pandemie reagierte der Großteil der betroffenen Länder mit Maßnahmen, die das öffentliche Leben weitgehend einschränkten. Gleichzeitig baten Politiker:innen und andere gesellschaftliche Akteur:innen die Menschen, Abstand zu halten und zu Hause zu bleiben. Vor diesem Hintergrund stellt sich die Frage, wer für Ursachen und Lösungen der Pandemie als verantwortlich wahrgenommen wurde. Maßgeblich geprägt wird eine solche Verantwortungswahrnehmung durch deren Darstellung in der medialen Berichterstattung mittels Responsibility Frames. Entsprechend setzt sich der vorliegende Beitrag mit den Responsibility Frames in der Berichterstattung zu COVID-19 sowie der Verantwortungswahrnehmung seitens der Bevölkerung in der ersten Welle der Pandemie in Deutschland auseinander. Zu diesem Zweck wurden eine teilstandardisierte Inhaltsanalyse der Printberichterstattung sowie eine bevölkerungsrepräsentative Online-Panelbefragung im Zeitraum Januar bis Mai 2020 durchgeführt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Medien insbesondere gesellschaftliche Verantwortung hervorhoben, während die Bevölkerung komplexere Verantwortungsattributionen aufwies. Insgesamt aber waren, anders als in der Berichterstattung, individuelle Verantwortungszuschreibungen in der Bevölkerung am stärksten ausgeprägt. Dies ist angesichts der Bedeutung der Verantwortungswahrnehmung für das individuelle Gesundheitsverhalten und die Bereitschaft, politische Maßnahmen zu unterstützen, ein zentraler Befund.At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the affected countries responded with measures that largely restricted public life. At the same time, politicians and other social actors repeatedly asked people to keep their distance and stay at home. Against this backdrop, the question arises as to who was perceived as responsible for causing and fixing the pandemic. Such a perception of responsibility is decisively shaped by its portrayal in media coverage. Accordingly, this article examines the responsibility frames in the reporting on COVID-19 and the perception of responsibility on the part of the population in the first wave of the pandemic in Germany (January to May 2020). For this purpose, a partially standardized content analysis of print coverage and a population-representative online panel survey were conducted. The results indicate that the media mostly emphasized societal responsibilities, while the population showed more complex attributions of responsibility. Overall, however, in contrast to the reporting, attributions of individual responsibility were strongest among the population. This is an important finding, given the importance of the perception of responsibility for individuals’ health behavior and the willingness to support political measures

Linguistic and memory correlates of societal variation: A quantitative analysis

Traditionally, researchers have proposed a uniformitarian view that all languages are roughly equally complex, via an internal trade-off between the complexity at different levels, such as morphology and syntax. The extent to which the societies where the speakers live influence the trade-off has not been well studied. In this paper, we focus on morphology and syntax, and report significant correlations between specific linguistic and societal features, in particular those relating to exoteric (open) vs. esoteric (close-knit) society types, characterizable in terms of population size, mobility, communication across distances, etc. We conducted an exhaustive quantitative analysis drawing upon WALS, D-Place, Ethnologue and Glottolog. Our results find some support for our hypothesis that languages spoken by exoteric societies tend towards more complex syntaxes, while languages spoken by esoteric societies tend towards more complex morphologies. Our hypothesis, as well as the interpretation of the results, are informed to some extent by the differential involvement of procedural vs. declarative memory types in the processing of syntax and morphology

Early-life education may help bolster declarative memory in old age, especially for women

Although declarative memory declines with age, sex and education might moderate these weaknesses. We investigated effects of sex and education on nonverbal declarative (recognition) memory in 704 older adults (aged 58–98, 0–17 years of education). Items were drawings of real and made-up objects. Age negatively impacted declarative memory, though this age effect was moderated by sex and object-type: it was steeper for males than females, but only for real objects. Education was positively associated with memory, but also interacted with sex and object-type: education benefited women more than men (countering the age effects, especially for women), and remembering real more than made-up objects. The findings suggest that nonverbal memory in older adults is associated negatively with age but positively with education; both effects are modulated by sex, and by whether learning relates to preexisting or new information. The study suggests downstream benefits from education, especially for girls