Papers by Sonja Eisenbeiss
The linguistic encoding of multiple-participant events
http://www.jstor.org THE MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF INFLECTED WORDS: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF ADJECTIVES AND VERBS IN GERMAN
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Story book stimulus for the elicitation of external possessor constructions and dative constructions ('the circle of dirt')
Most studies on bilingual children’s metalinguistic awareness (MA) assess MA using monolingual ta... more Most studies on bilingual children’s metalinguistic awareness (MA) assess MA using monolingual tasks. This may not reflect how a bilingual’s languages dynamically interact with each other in the formation of metalinguistic representations. We tested 33 Greek-Italian bilingual children (8-11 years) in their MA using acceptability-rating tasks in which they had to judge and explain grammatical errors. The tasks were in a monolingual and bilingual mode, in order to show how far MA in Italian benefited from the activation of Greek. Participants exhibited better MA abilities in Italian in the bilingual acceptability-rating task, in which Greek was activated. The benefits of the bilingual mode were visible in the judgement and explanation of errors and were modulated by syntactic processing abilities in Italian, length of exposure to Italian, type of structure and age. The results show that MA can be shared across languages. The pedagogical implications of the study are discussed.
Lexical Learning Hypothesis
Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2010
CEGS: An elicitation tool kit for studies on case marking and its acquisition
Blog Post: babytalk, motherese, caretaker-talk, child-directed speech - are they all names for the same thing?
Syntax and Language Acquisition
This chapter provides an overview of theoretical issues and core empirical findings in cross-ling... more This chapter provides an overview of theoretical issues and core empirical findings in cross-linguistic research on the acquisition of syntax. Section 1 identifies key issues in syntax acquisition research: (i) the respective contribution of learners' input and innate predispositions for language acquisition;(ii) the time course of syntactic development; (iii) the role of learners’ age and potential implications for monolingual, bilingual and second language (L2) acquisition. Section 2 introduces methods for investigating syntactic development. Section 3 discusses the relative role of learners’ input and innate predispositions for syntax acquisition. This section presents (i) generative, Optimality Theory and usage-based approaches to syntactic development and (ii) the empirical findings on learners’ input that form the background for the debate between proponents of the different approaches. Section 4 focuses on the emergence of syntax. The following sections discuss the acquis...
Linguistic Society of America The Mental Representation of Inflected Words : An Experimental Study of Adjectives and Verbs in German Author ( s )
Of the total number of utterances (1231), the relatively high number of errors in Instrumental an... more Of the total number of utterances (1231), the relatively high number of errors in Instrumental and Genitive Case markers (Table 1) are attributed to the child using an unfamiliar verb with a complex predicate structure for the first time as introduced by the researcher, and not because the child does not know the case marker. In the verbal elements (verbs and auxiliaries) children were observed to agree in gender with the object instead of with the subject even when there is no blocking of such agreement by overt case marking on the subject. Almost 40% of the agreement errors were observed to be due to this phenomenon. In order to
This article is published under a Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial). ... more This article is published under a Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial). The licence permits users to use, reproduce, disseminate or display the article provided that the author is attributed as the original creator and that the reuse is restricted to non-commercial purposes i.e. research or educational use. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ______________________________________________________
Essex Research Reports in Linguistics present ongoing research activities of members of the Depar... more Essex Research Reports in Linguistics present ongoing research activities of members of the Department of Language and Linguistics. The contents, form and distribution of the reports lie in the hands of the authors, and copyright remains with the author(s) of the reports as well. Most of the reports will subsequently appear in revised form as research articles in professional journals or in edited books. We are happy to exchange Essex Research Reports in Linguistics for working papers (or other publications) in linguistics and related disciplines. If you require extra copies of earlier issues of ERRL, please contact one of the author(s) directly.
Cognitive Semantics, 2017
Is motion cognition influenced by the large-scale typological patterns proposed in Talmy’s (2000)... more Is motion cognition influenced by the large-scale typological patterns proposed in Talmy’s (2000) two-way distinction between verb-framed (V) and satellite-framed (S) languages? Previous studies investigating this question have been limited to comparing two or three languages at a time and have come to conflicting results. We present the largest cross-linguistic study on this question to date, drawing on data from nineteen genealogically diverse languages, all investigated in the same behavioral paradigm and using the same stimuli. After controlling for the different dependencies in the data by means of multilevel regression models, we find no evidence that S- vs. V-framing affects nonverbal categorization of motion events. At the same time, statistical simulations suggest that our study and previous work within the same behavioral paradigm suffer from insufficient statistical power. We discuss these findings in the light of the great variability between participants, which suggests...
Extending Experimental Linguistics to Under-Researched Languages and Populations -The Principle of Justice and New Ethical Challenges
The majority of experimental studies in linguistics, psychology, and the social sciences involve ... more The majority of experimental studies in linguistics, psychology, and the social sciences involve participants who are undergraduate students in research-active universities or children of educated families in societies that are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic; see Henrichs et al. 2010). This leads to claims about universals of human language and behaviour that are not based on an appropriate empirical basis. It also violates the Principle of Justice as many populations are excluded from such studies and their benefits, for instance the development of appropriate materials for teaching or speech and language therapy. Hence, more and more experimental linguists have started to study previously under-researched languages and populations; and we are providing resources and information to support such projects (http://experimentalfieldlinguistics.wordpress.com/). These projects pose a broad range of ethical challenges. Some of them are challenges that any “traditional” linguistic fieldworker has to face, for instance avoiding coercion and guaranteeing informed consent when dealing with communities that are poor and characterised by low levels of education. However, the introduction of experimental methods into fieldwork contexts also gives rise to new ethical problems. In particular, we will discuss ethical issues that arise when standardized tests of performance (e.g. IQ-tests or tests of working memory) are carried out in small, close-knit communities where native speakers from the same community may become involved in the analysis of such data. We will also discuss (i) problems caused by data sharing in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies and (ii) conflicts that can occur when inter-disciplinary studies require ethical approval from boards with members from different disciplines (e.g. medical sciences, linguistics, psychology, and anthropology). Keywords: linguistics, justice, psycholinguistics, experiments, ethics
Kasus und Wortstellungsvariation im deutschen Mittelfeld. Theoretische Überlegungen und Untersuchungen zum Erstspracherwerb
Was determiniert Wortstellungsvariation?, 1994
Im Bereich der Psycholinguistik zeichnet sich in den letzten Jahren eine zunehmende Kooperation z... more Im Bereich der Psycholinguistik zeichnet sich in den letzten Jahren eine zunehmende Kooperation zwischen theoretischer Linguistik und empirischer Spracherwerbsforschung ab. Aus psycholinguistischer Sicht hat sich die generative Grammatiktheorie nicht nur als Beschreibungsrahmen fur Spracherwerbsdaten, sondern auch als Heuristik zur Entdeckung von Entwicklungszusammenhangen bewahrt. Aus grammatiktheoretischer Perspektive erhofft man sich aus der Einbeziehung von Erwerbsdaten eine Erweiterung der empirischen Basis fur die linguistische Theoriebildung. Sollte sich die in den letzten Jahren zunehmend vertretene Auffassung bestatigen, das samtliche Ubergangsgrammatiken des Kindes in den Geltungsbereich der UG fallen, konnen nicht nur Daten aus der Erwachsenensprache, sondern auch Daten aus dem Erstspracherwerb zur Entscheidung zwischen konkurrierenden syntaktischen Analysen herangezogen werden (cf. Rizzi 1993).
Linguistics, 2009
All proponents of generative approaches to language learning argue that the syntactic knowledge w... more All proponents of generative approaches to language learning argue that the syntactic knowledge which language learners acquire is underdetermined by the input. Therefore, they assume an innate language acquisition device which constrains the hypothesis space of children when they acquire their native language. However, it is still a matter of debate how general or domain-specific this acquisition mechanism is and whether it is fully available from the onset of language acquisition. This article provides an overview of the di¤erent answers that have been provided for these questions within generative linguistics. Moreover, it shows how the generative concept of ''learning'' has been applied to the acquisition of syntax, morphology, phonology and vocabulary, language processing, L2-acquisition, nontypical language development, creoles and language change. Finally, current developments, merits and problems of the generative approach to learning are discussed. The focus of this discussion will be on e¤orts to reduce assumptions about domain-specific innate predispositions for language learning.
Language Acquisition, 2006
This study examines the system of case marking in two groups of German-speaking children, five ch... more This study examines the system of case marking in two groups of German-speaking children, five children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and five typically-developing (TD) children matched to the SLI children on a general measure of language development. The data from both groups demonstrate high accuracy scores for structural case marking and overapplications of structural cases to instances that require lexical case marking in the adult language. These results, we argue, provide evidence for the sensitivity of both TD and SLI children for abstract, structure-based regularities, and is incompatible with accounts of SLI that posit broad syntactic deficits for these children.
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Papers by Sonja Eisenbeiss