Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation

The Collaborative Research Center 1412 “Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412) investigates the role of register in language, focusing in particular on what constitutes a language user’s register knowledge and which situational-functional factors determine a user’s choices. The following paper is an extract from the frame text of the proposal for the CRC 1412, which was submitted to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2019, followed by a successful onsite evaluation that took place in 2019. The CRC 1412 then started its work on January 1, 2020. The theoretical part of the frame text gives an extensive overview of the theoretical and empirical perspectives on register knowledge from the viewpoint of 2019. Due to the high collaborative effort of all PIs involved, the frame text is unique in its scope on register research, encompassing register-relevant aspects from variationist approaches, psycholinguistics, grammatical theory, acquisition theory, historical linguistics, phonology, phonetics, typology, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics, as well as qualitative and quantitative modeling. Although our positions and hypotheses since its submission have developed further, the frame text is still a vital resource as a compilation of state-of-the-art register research and a documentation of the start of the CRC 1412. The theoretical part without administrative components therefore presents an ideal starter publication to kick off the CRC’s publication series REALIS. For an overview of the projects and more information on the CRC, see https://sfb1412.hu-berlin.de/

Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods

In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center “Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define “register” as recurring variation in language use depending on the function of language and on the social situation. Informed by rich data, we aim to better understand and model the knowledge involved in situation- and function-based use of language register. In order to achieve this goal, we are using complementary methods and measures. In the review, we start by clarifying the concept of “register”, by reviewing the state of the art, and by setting out our methods and modeling goals. Against this background, we discuss three key challenges, two at the methodological level and one at the theoretical level: (1) To better uncover registers in text and spoken corpora, we propose changes to established analytical approaches. (2) To tease apart between-subject variability from the linguistic variability at issue (intra-individual situation-based register variability), we use within-subject designs and the modeling of individuals' social, language, and educational background. (3) We highlight a gap in cognitive modeling, viz. modeling the mental representations of register (processing), and present our first attempts at filling this gap. We argue that the targeted use of multiple complementary methods and measures supports investigating the pervasiveness of register phenomena and yields comprehensive insights into the cross-methodological robustness of register-related language variability. These comprehensive insights in turn provide a solid foundation for associated cognitive modeling.Peer Reviewe

Referential vs. Non-referential World-Language Relations: How Do They Modulate Language Comprehension in 4 to 5-Year-Olds, Younger, and Older Adults?

Age has been shown to influence language comprehension, with delays, for instance, in older adults' expectations about upcoming information. We examined to what extent expectations about upcoming event information (who-does-what-to-whom) change across the lifespan (in 4- to 5-year-old children, younger, and older adults) and as a function of different world-language relations. In a visual-world paradigm, participants in all three age groups inspected a speaker whose facial expression was either smiling or sad. Next they inspected two clipart agents (e.g., a smiling cat and a grumpy rat) depicted as acting upon a patient (e.g., a ladybug tickled by the cat and arrested by the rat). Control scenes featured the same three characters without the action depictions. While inspecting the depictions, comprehenders listened to a German sentence [e.g., Den Marienkäfer kitzelt vergnügt der Kater; literally: “The ladybug (object/patient) tickles happily the cat (subject/agent)”]. Referential verb-action relations (i.e., when the actions were present) could, in principle, cue the cat-agent and so could non-referential relations via links from the speaker's smile to “happily” and the cat's smile. We examined variation in participants' visual anticipation of the agent (the cat) before it was mentioned depending on (a) participant age and (b) whether the referentially mediated action depiction or the non-referentially associated speaker smile cued the agent. The action depictions rapidly boosted participants' visual anticipation of the agent, facilitating thematic role assignment in all age groups. By contrast, effects of the non-referentially cued speaker smile emerged in the younger adults only. We outline implications of these findings for processing accounts of the temporally coordinated interplay between listeners' age-dependent language comprehension, their interrogation of the visual context, and visual context influences.Peer Reviewe

Integration of Social Context vs. Linguistic Reference During Situated Language Processing

Research findings on language comprehension suggest that many kinds of non-linguistic cues can rapidly affect language processing. Extant processing accounts of situated language comprehension model these rapid effects and are only beginning to accommodate the role of non-linguistic emotional, cues. To begin with a detailed characterization of distinct cues and their relative effects, three visual-world eye-tracking experiments assessed the relative importance of two cue types (action depictions vs. emotional facial expressions) as well as the effects of the degree of naturalness of social (facial) cues (smileys vs. natural faces). We predicted to replicate previously reported rapid effects of referentially mediated actions. In addition, we assessed distinct world-language relations. If how a cue is conveyed matters for its effect, then a verb referencing an action depiction should elicit a stronger immediate effect on visual attention and language comprehension than a speaker's emotional facial expression. The latter is mediated non-referentially via the emotional connotations of an adverb. The results replicated a pronounced facilitatory effect of action depiction (relative to no action depiction). By contrast, the facilitatory effect of a preceding speaker's emotional face was less pronounced. How the facial emotion was rendered mattered in that the emotional face effect was present with natural faces (Experiment 2) but not with smileys (Experiment 1). Experiment 3 suggests that contrast, i.e., strongly opposing emotional valence information vs. non-opposing valence information, might matter for the directionality of this effect. These results are the first step toward a more principled account of how distinct visual (social) cues modulate language processing, whereby the visual cues that are referenced by language (the depicted action), copresent (the depicted action), and more natural (the natural emotional prime face) tend to exert more pronounced effects.Peer Reviewe

Speakers' emotional facial expressions modulate subsequent multi-modal language processing: ERP evidence

Maquate K, Kißler J, Knoeferle P. Speakers' emotional facial expressions modulate subsequent multi-modal language processing: ERP evidence. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. 2022.We investigated the brain responses associated with the integration of speaker facial emotion into situations in which the speaker verbally describes an emotional event. In two EEG experiments, young adult participants were primed with a happy or sad speaker face. The target consisted of an emotionally positive or negative IAPS photo accompanied by a spoken emotional sentence describing that photo. The speaker's face either matched or mismatched the event-sentence valence. ERPs elicited by the adverb conveying sentence valence showed significantly larger negative mean amplitudes in the EPN and descriptively in the N400 time windows for positive speaker faces - negative event-sentences (vs. negatively matching prime-target trials). Our results suggest that young adults might allocate more processing resources to attend to and process negative (vs. positive) emotional situations when being primed with a positive (vs. negative) speaker face but not vice versa. Post-hoc analysis indicated that this interaction was driven by female participants. We extend previous eye-tracking findings with insights into the timing of the functional brain correlates implicated in integrating the valence of a speaker face into a multi-modal emotional situation

The interplay of situation-formality register congruence and verb-argument relations

The semantic relation between a verb and its argument rapidly impacts language comprehension much like world knowledge and the linguistic context (Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Kutas & Hillyard, 1984; McRae et al., 1998). As part of the socially situated context, register could incrementally modulate comprehension and interact with standard language knowledge processing. Two self-paced reading experiments with an additional picture selection task examined how social-formality contexts and their (mis)matches with register use are comprehended in the presence of verb-argument semantic relation (mis)matches. We assessed whether comprehenders can rapidly adapt to shifting situation formality (Exp 2, N=64), or whether they benefit from habituation enabled by blocked presentation of formality (Exp 1, N=64). We successfully replicated incremental verb-argument (mis)match effects. No significant register effect was found, but the observed picture selection accuracy patterns could be taken to suggest that the processing of social contextual information might impact late sentence processing

Investigating the real-time effect of register-situation formality congruence versus verb-argument semantic fit during spoken language comprehension

This visual world eye-tracking pilot study investigates the comprehension of register variants (Stelzen_colloquial vs. Beine_standard transl:.‘’legs’) in a German target sentence when this target sentence (mis)matches the formality of a preceding context sentence, given the object argument either matches or mismatches verb meaning constraints (e.g. Ich rasiere bald meine Beine/Stelzen/#Autos/#Karren, transt.: ‘I shave my legs_standard/legs_coll/#cars_standard/#cars_coll’). The aim of this study is to examine whether register congruence rapidly interacts with verb-argument semantic relations. LME results (n=9) show a main effect of verb-argument congruence but no main effect of formality-register congruence at the region between the verb onset and object-argument onset, indicating that verb-argument relations are computed and used rapidly in online language comprehension. These pilot results suggest that situation formality may indeed modulate verb-argument congruency processing, possibly indicating that standard language processing mechanisms interact closely with register representations

(How) Do Register and Morphosyntactic Congruence Effects Interact during Sentence Reading? Two Eye-Tracking Pilot Studies

In two eye-tracking pilots during reading, we investigated real-time processing of formality-register congruence and subject-verb morphosyntactic congruence, and their relation. Participants read, in German, two context sentences conveying a formal or informal situation, followed by a target sentence containing a high- or low-register verb (e.g., Engl. transl. "The policeman detained the activist" vs. "The policeman grabbed the activist") which matched or mismatched context formality. The second pilot additionally manipulated subject-verb morphosyntactic congruence (e.g., Engl. transl. "*The policeman detain the activist"; "*The policeman grabbed the activist"). We observed main effects of formality-register and morphosyntactic congruence on verb reading times, as well as an interaction effect at the post-verbal object noun. Higher degrees of context and target sentence formality resulted in longer reading times. Ongoing investigation will further clarify our pilot findings, which suggest some interference between formality-register and morphosyntactic congruence processing