- Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Heike Tappe
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Linguistics, Faculty Member
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Natural language production is widely considered from an information processing point of view: In producing an utterance, mental representations of perceived or conceived states of affairs are first transferred to an intermediate level of... more
Natural language production is widely considered from an information processing point of view: In producing an utterance, mental representations of perceived or conceived states of affairs are first transferred to an intermediate level of propositional representations and are subsequently transformed into grammatical structures. The latter serve as input structures for phonological encoding, which results in the acoustic realization of utterances. This description of the production process follows Levelt’s model, which is outlined in Levelt (1989). Within this model, which compiles a multitude of earlier research (e.g. Fromkin, 1971; Garrett, 1980; Butterworth, 1980; Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1986), three major components interact, that are each responsible for well-defined phases within the global process of speech production. The conceptualizer draws on different knowledge sources that provide representations in multimodal formats and generates propositional conceptual structures, so-called preverbal messages, which represent the content the speaker intends to verbalize. These non-linguistic preverbal messages are transferred to the formulator Within the formulator, language specific encoding takes place; the end results of this process serve as input for the articulator. The latter is the component that carries out the phonological processing and the acoustic realization of an utterance (cf. also the description of the language production model in Glatz, Klabunde & Porzel, this volume).
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Research Interests: Art and Multilingualism
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Heike Tappe Der Spracherwerb bei Corpus-Callosum-Agenesie Eine explorative Studie Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen ... Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik Series A: Language Development 25 edited by Sascha W. Felix Jürgen M. Meise) Henning Wode
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Shared cognitive representations have been shown in different conceptual domains. An experiment is presented here that extends this line of research to the domain of events. Specifically, this experiment shows a cultural consensus in the... more
Shared cognitive representations have been shown in different conceptual domains. An experiment is presented here that extends this line of research to the domain of events. Specifically, this experiment shows a cultural consensus in the participants’ event taxonomies, and suggests a shared event taxonomy based on semantic relations. Showing such a shared event representation is an important first step for learning about the role of events in cognitive processes such as memory and thought.
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The current research is motivated by the assumption that the “canonical” story grammar (Stein & Glenn 1979) which is widely held to reflect universal story organisation (e.g. Mandler et al. 1980) may not be fully suited to assess the... more
The current research is motivated by the assumption that the “canonical” story grammar (Stein & Glenn 1979) which is widely held to reflect universal story organisation (e.g. Mandler et al. 1980) may not be fully suited to assess the narrative potential of children with primary languages of non-European origin (e.g. Souto-Manning 2013). It thus juxtaposes the supposedly universal “canonical” story grammar with the idea of an as yet under-researched Southern African story grammar, which may represent common macro-structural features in Southern African storytelling.
In this article, we conduct a comparative study which investigates challenges faced by isiZulu-speaking (L1) students with regard to appropriate politeness strategies in English (L2) business letters. We draw on the well-established... more
In this article, we conduct a comparative study which investigates challenges faced by isiZulu-speaking (L1) students with regard to appropriate politeness strategies in English (L2) business letters. We draw on the well-established distinction between interactional and transactional intentions in business writing. Data consists of a comparative bilingual business writing task as well as of a questionnaire that sought to identify specific challenges experienced by students in business communication. Findings indicate that students mostly implement politeness strategies successfully in their L1. In the L2, however, they manage to communicate transactional intentions but struggle with interactional intentions because they often do not address their audience appropriately and adopt unsuccessful politeness strategies. The article argues that isiZulu politeness constructions could empower students to communicate more efficiently when writing in their second language, English. The study m...
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Wayfinding Choremes-Conceptual Modeling for Pictorial Route Directions Alexander Klippel (klippel@ informatik. uni-bremen. de) Universital Bremen, Cognitive Systems Group, Germany Heike Tappe (heike. tappe@ rz. hu-berlin. de) Humboldt... more
Wayfinding Choremes-Conceptual Modeling for Pictorial Route Directions Alexander Klippel (klippel@ informatik. uni-bremen. de) Universital Bremen, Cognitive Systems Group, Germany Heike Tappe (heike. tappe@ rz. hu-berlin. de) Humboldt University at Berlin, English and ...
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This article explores attitudes of isiZulu home-language tertiary students regarding the use of contemporary poetry in isiZulu to disseminate academic content in English. In South African education sector English remains, by default, the... more
This article explores attitudes of isiZulu home-language tertiary students regarding the use of contemporary poetry in isiZulu to disseminate academic content in English. In South African education sector English remains, by default, the official medium of instruction despite constitutional directives stipulating that there be a parity of esteem between all eleven official languages of the country. The hegemony of English results in ambivalent attitudes among speakers of African languages towards the use of their own languages in education. In this article, we promote the value of isiZulu as a resource for academic learning – a means to reclaim indigenous languages and cultures. We assess students’ attitudes to explore whether contemporary poetry in isiZulu may serve as a tool to enhance access to academic content. The findings indicate positive yet diverse views on the use of contemporary poetry in isiZulu for the dissemination of academic content. The majority of the participants ...
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Shared cognitive representations have been shown in different conceptual domains. An experiment is presented here that extends this line of research to the domain of events. Specifically, this experiment shows a cultural consensus in the... more
Shared cognitive representations have been shown in different conceptual domains. An experiment is presented here that extends this line of research to the domain of events. Specifically, this experiment shows a cultural consensus in the participants’ event taxonomies, and suggests a shared event taxonomy based on semantic relations. Showing such a shared event representation is an important first step for learning about the role of events in cognitive processes such as memory and thought.
Research Interests: Psychology and Psykhé
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ABSTRACT Multilingual and bilingual societies are a growing reality the world over; in fact, current research indicates that speakers of two or more languages out-number monolingual speakers (Grosjean, 2010). Hence there is a growing... more
ABSTRACT Multilingual and bilingual societies are a growing reality the world over; in fact, current research indicates that speakers of two or more languages out-number monolingual speakers (Grosjean, 2010). Hence there is a growing interest in linguistic processes and representations in multi- and bilingual speakers . The multilingual mind poses a number of challenges to linguistic research. It may even be the ‘test-bed’ for our assumptions about language production and language comprehension models and ultimately our assumptions about the language faculty (Francis, 2011). The current chapter presents a synopsis of one set of such challenges by bringing together crucial observations on code mixing (in particular intra-sentential code mixing between Zulu and English) from fields as diverse as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition research, syntax, morphology, and the neurosciences. My objectives are threefold: My first objective is to conduct a ‘stock-taking’ exercise that juxtaposes selected findings and ideas from vastly different fields of linguistic research. My second objective is to provide examples from Zulu/English code-mixes that might be informative with respect to morphological processes and representations in a multilingual speaker. Finally, my third objective is to provide a ‘shopping list’ of research items that might be missing or be too low on supply in our research ‘cupboard’.
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Natural language production is widely considered from an information processing point of view: In producing an utterance, mental representations of perceived or conceived states of affairs are first transferred to an intermediate level of... more
Natural language production is widely considered from an information processing point of view: In producing an utterance, mental representations of perceived or conceived states of affairs are first transferred to an intermediate level of propositional representations and are subsequently transformed into grammatical structures. The latter serve as input structures for phonological encoding, which results in the acoustic realization of utterances. This description of the production process follows Levelt’s model, which is outlined in Levelt (1989). Within this model, which compiles a multitude of earlier research (e.g. Fromkin, 1971; Garrett, 1980; Butterworth, 1980; Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1986), three major components interact, that are each responsible for well-defined phases within the global process of speech production. The conceptualizer draws on different knowledge sources that provide representations in multimodal formats and generates propositional conceptual structures, so-called preverbal messages, which represent the content the speaker intends to verbalize. These non-linguistic preverbal messages are transferred to the formulator Within the formulator, language specific encoding takes place; the end results of this process serve as input for the articulator. The latter is the component that carries out the phonological processing and the acoustic realization of an utterance (cf. also the description of the language production model in Glatz, Klabunde & Porzel, this volume).
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Mediating between concepts and language Processing structures* Heike Tappe and Holden Hdrtl 1. Modules and interfaces One of the main ftinctions of language is to abstract over complex non-verbal message structures. The language system... more
Mediating between concepts and language Processing structures* Heike Tappe and Holden Hdrtl 1. Modules and interfaces One of the main ftinctions of language is to abstract over complex non-verbal message structures. The language system generates highly compact linguistic ...
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Die Möglichkeit, sich selbst im Raum zu positionieren, stellt eine der Grundfähigkeiten und zugleich eines der Grundbedürfnisse des Menschen dar..1 Der Raum, in dem wir uns bewegen, ist allgegenwärtig, denn fast jede konkrete Handlung... more
Die Möglichkeit, sich selbst im Raum zu positionieren, stellt eine der Grundfähigkeiten und zugleich eines der Grundbedürfnisse des Menschen dar..1 Der Raum, in dem wir uns bewegen, ist allgegenwärtig, denn fast jede konkrete Handlung setzt voraus, daß Aus-dehnungen und ...
Research Interests: Psychology and De Gruyter
Zusammenfassung. Ausgangspunkt der Untersuchung sind natürlich-sprachliche Beschreibungen statisch oder dynamisch dargebotener Wege-skizzen. Diese repräsentieren Entitäten der Realwelt, so daß eine Sprecherin entweder auf graphische oder... more
Zusammenfassung. Ausgangspunkt der Untersuchung sind natürlich-sprachliche Beschreibungen statisch oder dynamisch dargebotener Wege-skizzen. Diese repräsentieren Entitäten der Realwelt, so daß eine Sprecherin entweder auf graphische oder auf Realwelt-Entitäten ...
Eine wichtige Motivation der Sprachentwicklungsforschung besteht darin, daß sich aus der Beschäftigung mit der Entwicklung einer kognitiven Fähigkeit Erkenntnisse über diese Fähigkeit entwickeln lassen, die auf anderem Wege nicht... more
Eine wichtige Motivation der Sprachentwicklungsforschung besteht darin, daß sich aus der Beschäftigung mit der Entwicklung einer kognitiven Fähigkeit Erkenntnisse über diese Fähigkeit entwickeln lassen, die auf anderem Wege nicht zugänglich sind: "Approaches which do not take ...
Heike Tappe Der Spracherwerb bei Corpus-Callosum-Agenesie Eine explorative Studie Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen ... Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik Series A: Language Development 25 edited by Sascha W. Felix Jürgen M. Meise) Henning Wode
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From a cognition perspective, culture consists of shared cognitive representations in the minds of individuals (Romney, Boyd, Moore, Batchelder, & Brazil, 1996). This perspective has been empirically supported in different conceptual... more
From a cognition perspective, culture consists of shared cognitive representations in the minds of individuals (Romney, Boyd, Moore, Batchelder, & Brazil, 1996). This perspective has been empirically supported in different conceptual domains including, for example, the domain ...
Page 88. Chapter 4 My ways to Rome: Routes to multilingualism Heike ME Tappe Languages Explored: Moselle Franconian, German, English, Latin, French, Zulu, Arabic 1. Growing up in a diglossic environment Originally, I ...
Shared cognitive representations have been shown in different conceptual domains. An experiment is presented here that extends this line of research to the domain of events. Specifically, this experiment shows a cultural consensus in the... more
Shared cognitive representations have been shown in different conceptual domains. An experiment is presented here that extends this line of research to the domain of events. Specifically, this experiment shows a cultural consensus in the participants' event taxonomies, and suggests a shared event taxonomy based on semantic relations. Showing such a shared event representation is an important first step for learning about the role of events in cognitive processes such as memory and thought.
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Past research indicates that the acquisition and subsequent usage of tense/aspect markings by second language (L2) speakers pose particular challenges. Such challenges may emanate, inter alia, from differences in the tense/aspect systems... more
Past research indicates that the acquisition and subsequent usage of tense/aspect markings by second language (L2) speakers pose particular challenges. Such challenges may emanate, inter alia, from differences in the tense/aspect systems of a L2 speaker’s two languages. This article compares and contrasts the use of tense and aspect in isiZulu and English by isiZulu L1/ English L2 speakers. We conducted an empirical intra-individual study among first-year mechanical engineering students enrolled for a communication skills module at a university of technology. The participants produced two written reports on a hypothetical series of events which culminated in an imaginary laboratory accident. We investigate how similarities and differences between English and isiZulu manifest in the written reports of each student. The qualitative, intra-individual data analysis indicates that our participants carefully position the events on a linear timeline and that they encode the chronological s...
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Up to the development of the Verbmobil-prototype mainly two types of speech data within the domain of appointment scheduling are recorded: 1. German-German dialogues serving as test and trianing data, 2. Wizard-of-Oz-dialogues and some... more
Up to the development of the Verbmobil-prototype mainly two types of speech data within the domain of appointment scheduling are recorded: 1. German-German dialogues serving as test and trianing data, 2. Wizard-of-Oz-dialogues and some authentic German-English and ...
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Abstract While describing sketch maps speakers choose between at least two conceptual layers of representation: the layer representing graphical entities and the layer representing real world entities. In this paper we discuss the... more
Abstract While describing sketch maps speakers choose between at least two conceptual layers of representation: the layer representing graphical entities and the layer representing real world entities. In this paper we discuss the mechanisms and principles that underlie these ...