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.

German-speaking children use sentence-initial case marking for predictive language processing at age four.

Adults incrementally integrate multiple sources of information to predict the upcoming linguistic structure. Although we have substantial evidence that children can use lexicosemantic information triggered by the verb, we have limited information as to whether children can use morphosyntax to generate predictions during the course of processing. Previous studies show that four-year-old Turkish-speaking children can use case-marking cues predictively; however German-speaking children have been reported to fail until late in development. The present visual-world eye-tracking study provides the first evidence from four-year-old German-speaking children (mean age: 4;03) interpreting sentence initial case marking cues independent of the identity of the verb and the canonical word order to predict the thematic role of the upcoming argument. We presented children with a visual context with a stereotypical but ambiguous event, the thematic structure of which can be resolved only on the basis of the case marking cues on subject-initial and object-initial structures locating the verb sentence-finally. Children were able to use the accusative case on the non-canonical object-initial utterances to predict that the upcoming argument should have the agent role before this argument and the verb became available. This study shows that the previously reported discrepancy between these two case-marking languages (i.e., Turkish and German) is not due to the crosslinguistic differences but due to methodological differences employed across studies. These findings provide support for language acquisition theories assuming early abstractions and adult-like parsing mechanisms predictively integrating multiple sources of cues.

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.

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.