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PennController is a library extension for IBEX. It introduces a flexible and user-friendly syntax to design dynamic (e.g., scripted/timed events) and interactive (e.g., pictures, audio, videos, ...) trials.

We explore the impact of speaker identity on the interpretation of number words in a T(ruth)-V(alue) J(udgment) task – a paradigm in which respondents assess whether a given description appropriately represents a given body of facts. We find that imprecise statements from speakers socially expected to be less precise – i.e. “Chill” ones – are rejected at a higher rate, and thus held to more stringent evaluation standards, than those from speakers socially expected to speak more precisely – i.e. “Nerdy” ones, and especially so when participants do not identify with the speaker’s properties. This shows that TVJ assessments are impacted by respondents’ social perception of the speaker; but that they are affected by social considerations in a different way from other experimental tasks similarly tapping into meaning interpretation, suggesting a nuanced interplay between social information and pragmatic reasoning

PCIbex is a free web platform for designing and running a wide variety of behavioral experiments online. It provides a simple and accessible, yet versatile code interface for designing experimental tasks, and furthermore makes it possible to share experiment code and resources with a single click, allowing for easy replication. PCIbex comes with an easy-to-learn mini-language, which builds on a standard JavaScript engine. Advanced features include audio- and video-recording as well as an integration of the webgazer eye-tracking API. The workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to the basic functionalities, as well as illustrations of advanced features and time for Q&A. While already in fairly wide use in the linguistics community, the tutorial aims to make this resource more widely accessible within the cognitive science community at large.

Arbeit an der Bibliothek noch nicht eingelangt - Daten nicht geprüft Abweichender Titel laut Übersetzung des Verfassers/der Verfasserin Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Masterarbeit, 2019

The nature of presupposition projection from the scope of quantificational expressions, particularly negative ones, continues to be both theoretically and empirically controversial. We experimentally investigate the interpretation of sentences like None of the bears won the race , which could in principle be associated with three projection options, giving rise to: an existential reading, on which at least one of the bears participated and none won; a universal reading, on which all of the bears participated and none won; and a presuppositionless reading on which none of the bears both participated and won. We used a covered box task to investigate English-speaking adults’ and children’s interpretations of such sentences. The results from the adult participants provide empirical evidence for all three readings; the results from the child participants, however, reveal no evidence for the existential reading. We discuss our results in light of competing theoretical accounts, focusing on options for reconciling the theories with the experimental data from both adults and children.

Background Components of carotid atherosclerotic plaques can reliably be identified and quantified using high resolution in vivo 3-Tesla CMR. It is suspected that lipid apheresis therapy in addition to lowering serum lipid levels also has an influence on development and progression of atherosclerotic plaques. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of chronic lipid apheresis (LA) on the composition of atherosclerotic carotid plaques. Methods 32 arteries of 16 patients during chronic LA-therapy with carotid plaques and stenosis of 1–80% were matched according to degree of stenosis with 32 patients, who had recently suffered an ischemic stroke. Of these patients only the asymptomatic carotid artery was analyzed. All patients underwent black-blood 3 T CMR of the carotids using parallel imaging and dedicated surface coils. Cardiovascular risk factors were recorded. Morphology and composition of carotid plaques were evaluated. For statistical evaluation Fisher’s Exact and unpaired t-test were used. A p-value Results Patients in the LA-group were younger (63.5 vs. 73.9. years, p2, p Conclusion Results of this study suggest that, despite a severer risk profile for cardiovascular complications in LA-patients, chronic LA is associated with significantly lower lipid content in carotid plaques compared to plaques of patients without LA with similar degrees of stenosis, which is characteristic of clinically stable plaques.

This thesis is concerned with the description and analysis of two semantically different types of definite articles in German. While the existence of distinct article paradigms in various Germanic dialects and other languages has been acknowledged in the descriptive literature for quite some time, the theoretical implications of their existence have not been explored extensively. I argue that each of the articles corresponds to one of the two predominant theoretical approaches to analyzing definite descriptions: the `weak' article encodes uniqueness. The `strong' article is anaphoric in nature. In the course of spelling out detailed analyses for the two articles, various more general issues relevant to current semantic theory are addressed, in particular with respect to the analysis of donkey sentences and domain restriction. Chapter 2 describes the contrast between the weak and the strong article in light of the descriptive literature and characterizes their uses in terms of Hawkins's (1978) classification. Special attention is paid to two types of bridging uses, which shed further light on the contrast and play an important in the analysis developed in the following chapters. Chapter 3 introduces a situation semantics and argues for a specific version thereof. First, I propose that situation arguments in noun phrases are represented syntactically as situation pronouns at the level of the DP (rather than within the NP). Secondly, I argue that domain restriction (which is crucial for uniqueness analyses) can best be captured in a situation semantics, as this is both more economical and empirically more adequate than an analysis in terms of contextually supplied C-variables. Chapter 4 provides a uniqueness analysis of weak-article definites. The interpretation of a weak-article definite crucially depends on the interpretation of its situation pronoun, which can stand for the topic situation or a contextually supplied situation, or be quantificationally bound. I make a specific proposal for how topic situations (roughly, the situations that we are talking about) can be derived from questions and relate this to a more general perspective on discourse structure based on the notion of Question Under Discussion (QUD) (Roberts 1996, Buring 2003). I also show that it requires a presuppositional view of definites. A detailed, situation-semantic analysis of covarying interpretations of weak-article definites in donkey sentences is spelled out as well, which provides some new insights with regards to transparent interpretations of the restrictors of donkey sentences. Chapter 5 deals with so-called larger situation uses (Hawkins 1978), which call for a special, systematic way of determining the situation in which the definite is interpreted. I argue that a situation semantic version of an independently motivated type-shifter for relational nouns (shifting relations (he; he; stii) to properties (he; hstii)) brings about the desired situational effect. This type-shifter also applies to cases of part-whole bridging and provides a deeper understanding thereof. Another independently motivated mechanism, namely that of Matching functions, gives rise to similar effects, but in contrast to the type-shifter, it depends heavily on contextual support and cannot account for the general availability of larger situation uses that is independent of the context. The anaphoric nature of the strong article is described and analyzed in detail in chapter 6. In addition to simple discourse anaphoric uses, I discuss covarying interpretations and relational anaphora (the type of bridging expressed by the strong article). Cases where uniqueness does not hold (e.g., in so-called bishop sentences) provide crucial evidence for the need to encode the anaphoric link between strongarticle definites and their antecedents formally. The resulting dynamic analysis of strong-article definites encodes the anaphoric dependency via a separate anaphoric element that is incorporated into a uniqueness meaning. Finally, remaining challenges for the analysis are discussed, in particular the existence of strong-article definites without an antecedent and a puzzling contrast between the articles with respect to relative clauses. The final chapter discusses some loose ends that suggest directions for future work and sums up the main conclusions.