- Erwin-Schrödinger-Strasse 57/409
67663 Kaiserslautern
Germany - +49-631-205-4136
Shanley Allen
TU Kaiserslautern, Social Sciences, Faculty Member
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The present study investigates the developmental trajectory of abstract representations for syntactic structures in children. In a structural priming experiment on the dative alternation in German, we primed children from three different... more
The present study investigates the developmental trajectory of abstract representations for syntactic structures in children. In a structural priming experiment on the dative alternation in German, we primed children from three different age groups (3–4 years, 5–6 years, 7–8 years) and adults with double object datives (Dora sent Boots the rabbit) or prepositional object datives (Dora sent the rabbit to Boots). Importantly, the prepositional object structure in German is dispreferred and only rarely encountered by young children. While immediate as well as cumulative structural priming effects occurred across all age groups, these effects were strongest in the 3- to 4-year-old group and gradually decreased with increasing age. These results suggest that representations in young children are less stable than in adults and, therefore, more susceptible to adaptation both immediately and across time, presumably due to stronger surprisal. Lexical boost effects, in contrast, were not pres...
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This volume brings together twelve empirical studies on ditransitive constructions in Germanic languages and their varieties, past and present. Specifically, the volume includes contributions on a wide variety of Germanic languages,... more
This volume brings together twelve empirical studies on ditransitive constructions in Germanic languages and their varieties, past and present. Specifically, the volume includes contributions on a wide variety of Germanic languages, including English, Dutch, and German, but also Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, as well as lesser-studied ones such as Faroese. While the first part of the volume focuses on diachronic aspects, the second part showcases a variety of synchronic aspects relating to ditransitive patterns. Methodologically, the volume covers both experimental and corpus-based studies. Questions addressed by the papers in the volume are, among others, issues like the cross-linguistic pervasiveness and cognitive reality of factors involved in the choice between different ditransitive constructions, or differences and similarities in the diachronic development of ditransitives. The volume’s broad scope and comparative perspective offers comprehensive insights into well-known phe...
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This study investigated the universality of emotional prosody in perception of discrete emotions when semantics is not available. In two experiments the perception of emotional prosody in Hebrew and German by listeners who speak one of... more
This study investigated the universality of emotional prosody in perception of discrete emotions when semantics is not available. In two experiments the perception of emotional prosody in Hebrew and German by listeners who speak one of the languages but not the other was investigated. Having a parallel tool in both languages allowed to conduct controlled comparisons. In Experiment 1, 39 native German speakers with no knowledge of Hebrew and 80 native Israeli speakers rated Hebrew sentences spoken with four different emotional prosodies (anger, fear, happiness, sadness) or neutral. The Hebrew version of the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech (T-RES) was used for this purpose. Ratings indicated participants’ agreement on how much the sentence conveyed each of four discrete emotions (anger, fear, happiness and sadness). In Experient 2, 30 native speakers of German, and 24 Israeli native speakers of Hebrew who had no knowledge of German rated sentences of the German version of the T-...
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The manuscript provides readers with a basic methodological toolset for experimental psycholinguistic studies on translation. Following a description of key methodological concepts and the rationale behind experimental designs in... more
The manuscript provides readers with a basic methodological toolset for experimental psycholinguistic studies on translation. Following a description of key methodological concepts and the rationale behind experimental designs in psycholinguistics, we discuss experimental paradigms adopted from bilingualism research, which potentially constitute a methodological foundation for studies investigating the psycholinguistics of translation. Specifically, we show that priming paradigms possess several inherent advantages which make them particularly suitable for research on translation. The manuscript critically discusses key methodological problems associated with such paradigms and illustrates the opportunities they may offer for translation research, concludes with a review of past and current translation process research highlighting ways in which these can contribute to the issues raised by cross-linguistic priming studies.
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This study focuses on the syntactic and pragmatic resources heritage speakers (HS s) use to structure their discourse according to register. Drawing on a corpus of narratives produced by German HS s living in the United States, as well as... more
This study focuses on the syntactic and pragmatic resources heritage speakers (HS s) use to structure their discourse according to register. Drawing on a corpus of narratives produced by German HS s living in the United States, as well as by monolingually-raised speakers (MS s) of English and German, we investigated HS s’ syntactic resources by analyzing how they approached clause type optionality across registers. Concerning overall clause type frequencies, HS s performed similarly to MS s in their majority English, but showed differences in their heritage German compared to German MS s. This can be attributed to the majority language dominance and different complexity of clause types in the heritage language. However, regarding the pattern of clause types across registers, HS s’ productions are similar to those of German MS s, and across HS s’ two languages. This suggests an underlying register awareness that HS s can draw upon in their heritage language.
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In this study we investigated parafoveal processing by L1 and late L2 speakers of English (L1 German) while reading in English. We hypothesized that L2ers would make use of semantic and orthographic information parafoveally. Using the... more
In this study we investigated parafoveal processing by L1 and late L2 speakers of English (L1 German) while reading in English. We hypothesized that L2ers would make use of semantic and orthographic information parafoveally. Using the gaze contingent boundary paradigm, we manipulated six parafoveal masks in a sentence (Mark found th*e wood for the fire; * indicates the invisible boundary): identical word mask (wood), English orthographic mask (wook), English string mask (zwwl), German mask (holz), German orthographic mask (holn), and German string mask (kxfs). We found an orthographic benefit for L1ers and L2ers when the mask was orthographically related to the target word (wood vs. wook) in line with previous L1 research. English L2ers did not derive a benefit (rather an interference) when a non-cognate translation mask from their L1 was used (wood vs. holz), but did derive a benefit from a German orthographic mask (wood vs. holn). While unexpected, it may be that L2ers incur a swi...
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Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For example, words that are heard more... more
Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For example, words that are heard more frequently tend to be produced earlier by young children. However, pure repetition only goes so far; some variation between utterances is necessary to support acquisition of a fully productive grammar. When individual words or morphemes are repeated, but embedded in different lexical and syntactic contexts, the child has more information about how these forms may be used and combined. Corpus analysis has shown that these partial repetitions frequently occur in clusters, which have been coined variation sets. More recent research has introduced algorithms that can extract these variation sets automatically from corpora with the goal of measuring their relative prevalence across ages and languages. Longitudinal analyses have revealed that rates of variation sets tend to decrease as children get older. We extend this research in several ways. First, we consider a maximally diverse sample of languages, both genealogically and geographically, to test the generalizability of developmental trends. Second, we compare multiple levels of repetition, both words and morphemes, to account for typological differences in how information is encoded. Third, we consider several additional measures of development to account for deficiencies in age as a measure of linguistic aptitude. Fourth, we examine whether the levels of repetition found in child-surrounding speech is greater or less than what would have been expected by chance. This analysis produced a new measure, redundancy, which captures how repetitive speech is on average given how repeititive it could have been. Fifth, we compare rates of repetition in child-surrounding and adult-directed speech to test whether variation sets are especially prevalent in child-surrounding speech. We find that (1) some languages show increases in repetition over development, (2) true estimates of variation sets are generally lower than or equal to random baselines, (3) these patterns are largely convergent across developmental indices, and (4) adult-directed speech is reliably less redundant, though in some cases more repetitive, than child-surrounding speech. These results are discussed with respect to features of the corpora, typological properties of the languages, and differential rates of change in repetition and redundancy over children's development.
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The category “native speaker” is flawed because it fails to consider the diversity between the speaker groups falling under its scope, as highlighted in previous literature. This paper provides further evidence by focusing on the... more
The category “native speaker” is flawed because it fails to consider the diversity between the speaker groups falling under its scope, as highlighted in previous literature. This paper provides further evidence by focusing on the similarities and differences between heritage speakers (HSs) and monolingually-raised speakers (MSs) of their heritage and majority languages. HSs are bilinguals who acquire a family (heritage) language and a societal (majority) language in early childhood. Naturalistic exposure from early childhood qualifies them as native speakers of their heritage language. Some HSs are simultaneous bilinguals, which makes them native speakers of their majority language as well. Others are early second language acquirers who may be indistinguishable from simultaneous bilinguals. Previous research shows that the heritage language productions of German HSs in the United States do not completely overlap with those of German MSs, who are, by default, native speakers. In over...
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This paper presents an attempt to continuously annotate the emotion and status of multimodal corpora for understanding psychotherapeutic interviews. The collected continuous annotations are then used as the signal data to find change... more
This paper presents an attempt to continuously annotate the emotion and status of multimodal corpora for understanding psychotherapeutic interviews. The collected continuous annotations are then used as the signal data to find change points in the dialogues. Our target dialogues are carried between clients with some psychological problems and their therapists. We measured two values, namely the degree of the dialogue progress and the degree of clients being listened to. The first value reflects the goal-oriented nature of the target dialogues. The second value corresponds to the idea of active listening that is considered as an important aspect in psychotherapy. We have modified an existing continuous emotion annotation toolkit that has been created for tracking generic emotion of dialogues. By applying a change point detection algorithm on the obtained annotations, we evaluated the validity and utility of the collected annotation based on our method.
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English has long been characterized as a satellite-framed language (Talmy, 1991). Its vast array of Manner verbs that co-occur with Path particles allow speakers to talk about motion with simple, single-clause syntactic constructions,... more
English has long been characterized as a satellite-framed language (Talmy, 1991). Its vast array of Manner verbs that co-occur with Path particles allow speakers to talk about motion with simple, single-clause syntactic constructions, regardless of the structure of an event. Thus, English speakers can describe an event that is telic, crosses a general
We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on... more
We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the openaccess RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. (1) We found noncanonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. (2) We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. (3) In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the nativespeaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for noncanonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike.
Research Interests: Languages and Linguistics, Greek Language, Multilingualism, English language, German Language, and 15 moreSyntax, Morphology, Linguistics, Russian Language, Language Variation, Heritage language studies, Turkish Language, Bilingualism, Language contact, Phonetics and Phonology, Heritage Language Speakers, Namibia, Monolingualism, Native Speaker, and German in Namibia
In two cross-linguistic priming experiments with native German speakers of L2 English, we investigated the role of constituent order and level of embedding in cross-linguistic structural priming. In both experiments, significant priming... more
In two cross-linguistic priming experiments with native German speakers of L2 English, we investigated the role of constituent order and level of embedding in cross-linguistic structural priming. In both experiments, significant priming effects emerged only if prime and target were similar with regard to constituent order and also situated on the same level of embedding. We discuss our results on the basis of two current theoretical accounts of cross-linguistic priming, and conclude that neither an account based on combinatorial nodes nor an account assuming that constituent order is directly responsible for the priming effect can fully explain our data pattern. We suggest an account that explains cross-linguistic priming through a hierarchical tree representation. This representation is computed during processing of the prime, and can influence the formulation of a target sentence only when the structural features specified in it are grammatically correct in the target sentence.
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We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on... more
We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. (1) We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domain...
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We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on... more
We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. (1) We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. (2) We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. (3) In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike.
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The Role of Joint Attention in Argument Realization in Child Inuktitut Barbora Skarabela andShanley Allen Boston University 1. Introduction One characteristic feature of child language is its high frequency of argument omissions. ... 2002... more
The Role of Joint Attention in Argument Realization in Child Inuktitut Barbora Skarabela andShanley Allen Boston University 1. Introduction One characteristic feature of child language is its high frequency of argument omissions. ... 2002 Barbora Skarabela and Shanley Allen. ...
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Page 1. FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OF INUKTITUT SHANLEY EM ALLEN* MARTHA B. CARGO Introduction Though relatively little research has been done on the first language acquisition of Inuit-Aleut languages, it is an important field of study.... more
Page 1. FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OF INUKTITUT SHANLEY EM ALLEN* MARTHA B. CARGO Introduction Though relatively little research has been done on the first language acquisition of Inuit-Aleut languages, it is an important field of study. ...
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In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds’ real-time... more
In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds’ real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to SVO or OVS sentences containing active accusative verbs (küssen “to kiss”) in Experiment 1 (N = 72), or dative object-experiencer verbs (gefallen “to like”) in Experiment 2 (N = 64). This was followed by the personal pronoun er or the demonstrative pronoun der. Interpretive preferences for er were most robust when high prominence cues (first mention, subject, proto-agent) were aligned onto the same entity; and the same applied to der for low prominence cues (second mention, object, proto-patient). These preferences were reduced in conditions where cues were misaligned, and there was evidence that each cue independently influenced performance. Crucially, individual variation in age predicted adult-like ...
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APA PsycNET Our Apologies! - The following features are not available with your current Browser configuration. - alerts user that their session is about to expire - display, print, save, export, and email selected records - get My ...
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Evidence from late acquisition of passive structures and early overgeneralization of lexical causatives in English child language has been taken as evidence for maturation as an important process in language acquisition (Borer &... more
Evidence from late acquisition of passive structures and early overgeneralization of lexical causatives in English child language has been taken as evidence for maturation as an important process in language acquisition (Borer & Wexler, 1987). However, recent cross-linguistic research shows relatively early acquisition of passive in several non-Indo-European languages, apparently countering the claim of maturation and attributing relative time of acquisition of passive to language-specific factors (Demuth, 1989; Pye & Quixtan Pos, 1988; Suzman, 1985). This paper presents naturalistic spontaneous speech data from three Inuit children, aged 2;0 through 3;6, which also argue that a maturation hypothesis cannot be tenable as currently formulated. Inuktitut data show productive mastery of passive structures as early as 2;0 and lack a clear causal relationship between the D-structure of intransitive verbs and the overgeneralization of lexical causatives. The paper argues that the ergative structure of Inuktitut adequately accounts for these language-specific facts.
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... 2003 S. Allen, A. Özyürek, S. Kita, A. Brown, R. Turanh. ... In John W. Du Bois, Lorraine E. Kumpf & William J. Ashby (Eds.), Preferred Argument Structure: Grammar as architecture for ... In Eve V.... more
... 2003 S. Allen, A. Özyürek, S. Kita, A. Brown, R. Turanh. ... In John W. Du Bois, Lorraine E. Kumpf & William J. Ashby (Eds.), Preferred Argument Structure: Grammar as architecture for ... In Eve V. Clark (Ed.), Proceedings of the 3&h Stanford Child Language Research Forum (pp. ...
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The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e.... more
The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child speech between the ages of 1;11 and 6;7, in correspondence with their caregivers' speech. We define developmental stages based on dendrograms derived from variability clustering (Gries & Stoll, 2009). These stages are further substantiated by qualitative data, including overgeneralization errors and alternating structures. We find that Persian-speaking children learn to exploit two (i.e. lexical and light verb construction causatives) of the four constructions. They go from relying on lexical causatives to forming progressively constrained templates for the more complex light verb construction. This first study of the development of Per...
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Page 239. Formalism and functionalism working together? Exploring roles for complementary contributions in the domain of child null arguments Shanley EM Allen Boston University Explanations of child subject and object omission ...
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This study investigates subject omission in six English-Inuktitut simultaneous bilingual children, aged 1;8–3;9, to examine whether there are cross-language influences in their language development. Previous research with other language... more
This study investigates subject omission in six English-Inuktitut simultaneous bilingual children, aged 1;8–3;9, to examine whether there are cross-language influences in their language development. Previous research with other language pairs has shown that the morphosyntax of one language can influence the development of morphosyntax in the other language. Most of this research has focused on Romance-Germanic language combinations using case studies. In this study, we examined a language pair (English-Inuktitut) with radically different morphosyntactic structures. Analysis of the English-only and Inuktitut-only utterances of the children revealed monolingual-like acquisition patterns and subject omission rates. The data indicate that these bilingual children possessed knowledge of the target languages that was language-specific and that previously identified triggers for crosslinguistic influence do not operate universally.
Research Interests: Psychology, Multilingualism, English, Linguistics, Bilingual Language Acquisition, and 15 moreMedicine, Humans, Child, Female, Male, Infant, Language Culture and Communication, Inuktitut, Tape Recording, Child Language, Verbal Learning, Cross Linguistic Influence, Child preschool, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
ABSTRACTPassive structures are typically assumed to be one of the later acquired constructions in child language. English-speaking children have been shown to produce and comprehend their first simple passive structures productively by... more
ABSTRACTPassive structures are typically assumed to be one of the later acquired constructions in child language. English-speaking children have been shown to produce and comprehend their first simple passive structures productively by about age four and to master more complex structures by about age nine. Recent crosslinguistic data have shown that this pattern may not hold across languages of varying structures. This paper presents data from four Inuit children aged 2;0 to 3;6 that shows relatively early acquisition of both simple and complex forms of the passive. Within this age range children are productively producing truncated, full, action and experiential passives. Some possible reasons for this precociousness are explored including adult input and language structure.
Research Interests: Psychology, Language Acquisition, Syntax, Language Development, Language, and 15 moreMedicine, Humans, Child, Female, Male, Hypothesis testing, Developmental Stages, Inuktitut, Adult, Phrase Structure, Child Language, Nino, Passive structures, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
... English and/or French. 3.2. Data collection. The children were videotaped by ShanleyAllen, four hours per month for nine months, in naturalistic communication situa-tions with their friends and families. Though the (grand)parents ...
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What are the relations between linguistic encoding and gestural representations of events during online speaking? The few studies that have been conducted on this topic have yielded somewhat incompatible results with regard to whether and... more
What are the relations between linguistic encoding and gestural representations of events during online speaking? The few studies that have been conducted on this topic have yielded somewhat incompatible results with regard to whether and how gestural representations of events change with differences in the preferred semantic and syntactic encoding possibilities of languages. Here we provide large scale semantic, syntactic and temporal analyses of speech- gesture pairs that depict 10 different motion events from 20 Turkish and 20 English speakers. We find that the gestural representations of the same events differ across languages when they are encoded by different syntactic frames (i.e., verb-framed or satellite-framed). However, where there are similarities across languages, such as omission of a certain element of the event in the linguistic encoding, gestural representations also look similar and omit the same content. The results are discussed in terms of what gestures reveal a...