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The aim of this study was to test whether the availability of internal imagery elicited by words is related to ratings of word imageability. Participants are presented with target words and, after a delay allowing for processing of the word, answer questions regarding the size or weight of the word referents. Target words differ with respect to imageability. Results show faster responses to questions for high imageability words than for low imageability words. The type of question (size/weight) modulates reaction times suggesting a dominance of the visual domain over the physical-experience domain in concept representation. Results hold across two different languages (Czech/German). These findings provide further insights into the representations underlying word meaning and the role of word imageability in language acquisition and processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored the communication strategies of college students majoring in one of five modern foreign languages (i.e., English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish) and their relation to communication confidence. It also explored the association between their strategy use and the difficulty regarding the speaking components, and students' feedback on pedagogical tasks to improve their speaking ability. A questionnaire survey of communication strategy was distributed to 538 college students in Taiwan, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 students. The results showed that there was a statistically significant difference between the majored language and the use of communication strategies. Specifically, a one-way between-groups MANOVA revealed that the participants adopted the message reduction/alteration and fluency-oriented strategies frequently and equally, regardless of the language they studied. English and Spanish learners employed social affective, phonological awareness, and negotiation for meaning while speaking strategies more frequently than German learners. Students who reported difficulties in fluency, lexical resources, grammatical accuracy, and pronunciation while speaking the major language employed social affective strategies less frequently. Finally, students' preferences for particular tasks reflected the speaking components they wished to foster. It is concluded that lexical and grammatical knowledge should be emphasized first to build communication confidence and strengthen fluency. Plain language summary: Exploring How Students Learn Foreign Languages: Communication Approaches, Challenges, and Speaking Exercises This research looked into how college students who are studying different foreign languages (like English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish) communicate and how confident they feel about it. It also checked if the strategies they use relate to how difficult they find speaking, and what they think about tasks meant to improve their speaking skills. I gave a survey about communication strategies to 538 college students in Taiwan, and interviewed 20 of them in more depth. The finding was that the language students were studying made a difference in the strategies they used. For example, students tended to use certain strategies, like simplifying their message or focusing on fluency, no matter which language they were learning. However, those learning English and Spanish used strategies related to social interaction, pronunciation, and understanding the meaning of what's being said more often compared to those learning German. Students who struggled with fluency, vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation tended to use social interaction strategies less often. Also, the tasks students preferred for improving their speaking skills matched up with the aspects of speaking they wanted to get better at. In conclusion, it seems like building up vocabulary and grammar knowledge first can help students feel more confident in their communication and improve how fluently they speak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives: Whether bilinguals show language-dependent emotions often depends on the emotion measure used. Here, we examine if differences between automatic pupil reactions and self-reported feelings in response to an emotional narrative presented in a first, second, or heritage language (HL) indicate different stages of emotion processing. Methodology: German HL speakers of Russian and Turkish (n = 72) and German second language (L2) speakers of English and French (n = 89) listened to a video-based emotional narrative in German or their other language and rated how they felt about it (arousal and valence). We contrasted pupil diameter during the video with a language-specific baseline. Age of acquisition, language use frequency in emotional contexts, and language proficiency were used to verify that HL speakers were balanced simultaneous and L2 speakers unbalanced sequential bilinguals. Data and analysis: Linear mixed-effects models were fitted to the pupillometry data and ordinal logistic models to the self-report data. Findings and conclusions: HL speakers showed similar automatic reactions in both languages but rated the German narrative less emotional. L2 speakers showed weaker automatic reactions in L2 yet rated the narrative similar in both languages. This reversed pattern confirmed that automatic and conscious emotion measures tap into different stages of bilingual emotion processing. Furthermore, language-dependent emotions in self-reports seem to be linked to sociocultural frames that go beyond the scope of context and processing-based explanations. Originality: The study is among the first to systematically examine discrepancies between automatic and conscious measures of bilingual language-dependent emotions with different types of bilinguals and within one experimental paradigm. Significance: The findings imply that theories of bilingual emotions need further development to explain consistently and explicitly why language-dependent emotional reactions vary with bilingualism and emotion measures. Methodologically, the findings advocate for multi-measure approaches to enhance the validity of future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In German, symmetrical treatment of women and men through gender-fair language is well established and the use of feminine forms is evaluated positively. In the present study (N = 331), we examined the mechanisms behind this positive evaluation. Female job applicants were evaluated as more linguistically competent and as more competent in general, which translated into more favorable hiring decisions when using a feminine (vs. a masculine) job title. These results illuminate positive effects of successful language reform for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a book review of "W.G. Sebald in Context" edited by Uwe Schütte. The review discusses the contributions to the book, which reflect the current state of Sebald studies and often rework previously published material. It also highlights the scarcity and unreliability of biographical information on Sebald. The review provides an overview of the different sections of the book, including biographical aspects, literary works, themes and influences, reception and legacy. It notes some criticisms and discrepancies in the book, such as the inclusion of chapters on media theory and photography that lack established scholarship. Overall, the review suggests that the book is a valuable resource for understanding Sebald's work and its reception, but readers should be aware of potential biases and limitations. [Extracted from the article]

Credit and debt are more than just material exchanges within a market economy, they are also social constructs embedded in moral judgments about the character of the agents involved. During the recent European Sovereign Bond crisis, some commentators noted how a similarly loaded moral media discourse juxtaposed "virtuous" Northern European countries on the one side, and "spendthrift, lazy" Southern European ones on the other side. In this article, I provide a quantitative large-N empirical assessment of this phenomenon. I employ a dictionary-based approach inspired by research in social psychology to measure moral content. Upon analyzing more than 14,000 articles published in the Anglo-American and German financial press between 2004 and 2019, I show the extent to which Greece was described in negative moral language. After the initial "shock" in the fall of 2009, the average moral tone turns negative, and more so in the German financial press relative to its Anglo-American counterpart. Moreover, by most measures, it never completely reverts to pre-crisis levels, thus suggesting how "sticky" economic narratives can become. Against the original expectations, though, there is no evidence that the financial press framed the last and most acute phase of the Greek crisis in 2015 in increasingly moral terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies found an impact of language familiarity on face recognition in 9- and 12-month-olds. Own race faces are better recognized when associated with native language, whereas for other race faces, it is with non-native language. The aim of this study is to investigate if language familiarity can also influence abstract pattern recognition. We tested 9- to 12-month-old monolingual infants with a visual paired-comparison task. During a 30-s familiarization phase, infants were shown an image of abstract patterns associated with an auditory soundtrack of a speaker reciting a story either in their native (French) or in a non-native language (German). After the familiarization, the familiar and a new abstract pattern were displayed side by side for the recognition test. We found a significant preference for the novel object in the native language condition but not in the non-native condition. These results suggest that language familiarity effects on infant memory are not specific to faces but also influence, on a larger scale, how infants process their immediate visual environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: This study explores the asymmetric placement of the finite verb in Korean L2 German speakers and examines the effect of sociolinguistic factors on the produced verb placement patterns. Design/methodology/approach: Fifty-eight participants performed a sentence completion task that elicited the preferred placement of the (finite) verb in matrix and subordinate clauses. In addition, language background interviews were conducted to better understand the sociolinguistic circumstances of the Korean immigrants. Data and analysis: The experimental data are analyzed using implicational scaling to identify patterns of verb placement. The effect of sociolinguistic factors was tested fitting an ordinal logistic regression model. Findings/conclusions: Contrary to the developmental stages of L2 German syntax found in previous research, the experimental results revealed that target-like subordinate clauses are produced more robustly than verb second (V2) constructions. It is argued that this result is better explained with difficulties producing subject-verb inversion, V2, than with facilitative L1 transfer effects from Korean, producing German subordinate clauses with V-final order. Concerning social factors, the type of occupation (coal miner or nurse) was most significant in predicting the preferred L2 verb placement pattern, followed by L2 education and age of immigration. Originality: This article adds to the understanding of L2 German syntax by revisiting previously identified stages of L2 German development with data that target the preferred verb placement in matrix and subordinate clauses from less-researched L1 Korean speakers. The intra-group distinction of Korean immigrants into coal miners and nurses further allows a differentiated look at the role of sociolinguistic factors. Significance/implications: This research is significant as it aims to draw a comprehensive picture of L2 German acquisition and usage in the context of labor migration, highlighting a less-studied group of immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives: This study investigates the acquisition of referential expressions for direct objects by child heritage speakers of Polish living in Germany. Our main research questions are how object expression develops in bilingual children and whether their path or pace of acquisition differs from monolingual children. Methodology: We investigate the use of referential expressions in an elicited production task. In all, 39 Polish-German bilingual children participated in the test. Data and analysis: We compare the data of four age groups of bilingual children – 3- to 4-year-olds, 5- to 6-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and 9- to 10-year-olds – to each other and to monolingual children at the respective ages. For the analysis of participants' responses, we ran a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) with a multinominal dependent variable. Findings: The results show that child heritage language (HL) speakers of Polish display knowledge of semantic and pragmatic constraints of object realization from early stages on. However, from age 5 and up to age 9 to 10, they still produce high rates of inappropriate null objects and show a deceleration in the development of this knowledge, compared to monolingual children. This protracted development is attributed to reduced input in the HL, mainly due to the enrolment in the majority language school. Originality: This study is the first to investigate the development of referential expressions for direct objects in child heritage speakers of Polish in the age span 3 to 10 years. Significance: The study relates the higher rates of null objects in the bilingual production to the varying degrees of exposure to the HL during language development. Deceleration in the pace of object acquisition by the HL speakers at the age of 5 to 6 years is attributed to a prolonged stage of acquisition of integrating rules of syntactic and pragmatic knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and Objectives: The study investigates the effects of age, language use, and attitudes on Portuguese returnee bilinguals' knowledge of German nominal morphology. We focused on language attrition. In addition, we compared whether the results of returnee bilinguals differ in relevant ways from the performance of L1 speakers of German and, if so, in which domains. Methodology: A background questionnaire and offline tasks that elicit lexical knowledge, case, gender, and plural marking in German were applied to a group of Portuguese–German bilingual returnees (N = 20) and a group of German L1 speakers (N = 20). Data and Analysis: The elicited data were analyzed through non-parametric tests (Mann–Whitney tests, Wilcoxon tests, and Spearman correlation tests), since not all the requirements for running mixed models could be fulfilled. Findings: The results show that bilingual returnees have very stable knowledge of the analyzed properties: parts of morphosyntactic knowledge are acquired and stabilized in childhood and remain highly invulnerable to loss of contact throughout the speakers' lifetime. However, returnees' knowledge of the German case system is constrained by age of input loss, language use, and attitudes. Ungrammatical plural marking is correlated with the speakers' bonds to the German language and culture. No cross-linguistic influence from Portuguese was found in the domain of plural marking. Originality: This study resumes the question of differential attrition effects in returnee bilinguals by using a more controlled methodology. It extends the investigation to returnees' performance in the lexical domain and with regard to case, gender, and number morphology in German, also quantifying other variables, such as the age of onset of bilingualism, the amount of contact with German after return, and the length of residence in Portugal. In addition, it focuses the less researched question regarding the role of the returnees' attitudes toward both their languages. Significance/Implications: The study highlights the multi-dimensional factors that constrain language proficiency over a bilingual speaker's lifetime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Jane Austen's novels conversation provides internal evidence of the nature of characters, both moral and social (Morini, 2009). Among the interplay of speech presentation forms (Bray, 2018; Page, 1972), Narrative Report of Speech Acts (Leech and Short, 2007) is still underresearched (Busse, 2020) as a characterisation resource. Research on speech reports in inquit formulae has focused on illocutionary features (Austin, 1962; Searle and Vanderveken, 1985). However, speech reports also introduce the intersubjective stances adopted by characters and by the narrator, i.e., their receptiveness to disagreeing positions. As engagement resources (Martin and White, 2005), they construct interpersonal styles and offer cues into the narrator's own stance toward the characters. Such meaning complexes are a challenge for literary translators. For this study, 55 instances of NRSA were sampled from three chapters of Mansfield Park and their correspondences in two Spanish and two German translations. The original text and the translations display remarkable lexical richness, with 36 instances overtly expressing illocutionary force. Characterisation cues appear at the character level of discourse, through the illocutionary features and engagement types attributed to characters (e.g. monoglossic, heteroglossic), and also on the narrator level of discourse, through linguistic co-textual choices weakening the endorsement of the character. All four translations contain shifts affecting the characterisation potential such as changes in a character's stance, the early disclosure of a character's attitude, and the insertion of explicit narratorial evaluation of a character. These findings are applicable in stylistics as well as in translation assessment and pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On July 17, 2021, the CDU's chancellor candidate Armin Laschet was photographed laughing during a speech by the German Federal President in the flood-stricken city of Erftstadt. The photographic images caused an uproar and contributed to the CDU's defeat in the September 23 election. The paper analyzes why these images resonated with such damaging effects. Theoretically, it sets the analysis on the background of the moralization and personalization of politics and argues that photography, with its ability to capture behavior at a distance, plays a prominent role in these processes. While this condition explains why an image of a laughing politician can generate such indignation in the first place, the paper discusses how this effect was amplified in the case of Laschet by a range of contextual features: (a) the timing of the images in the middle of an election period where politicians come under intense scrutiny; (b) their appearance in a crisis situation (the German flooding disaster) where politicians are surrounded by other role expectations than in routine periods; (3) Laschet's new, insecure position as leader of the CDU; (d) his history of scandals and poor political judgment; and (e) the frivolous and boisterous manner of his laughter. At a general theoretical level, the paper's insights caution us to avoid prima facie conclusions about the autonomous power of photographs. Instead, they encourage analytical sensitivity to the importance of timing and context as explanatory elements in our understanding of photographic exposés. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the cross-language influence of a reader's first language (L1, German) grammar knowledge on the syntactic processing of sentences in their second language (L2, English), using a grammaticality judgement task and comparing results with monolingual L1 English-speakers. In Experiment 1, unbalanced bilinguals (N = 82) read sentences in their L1 German and L2 English that were either grammatical in German but not English, grammatical in English but not German, or ungrammatical in both languages. Sentences were presented in mixed-language blocks. Grammaticality judgements were less accurate and slower for ungrammatical L2 sentences that were grammatical in their literal L1 translation, compared with sentences that were ungrammatical in both languages. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with an independent German-English bilingual sample (N = 78), using monolingual language blocks. In Experiment 3, effects were absent in decision accuracy and weaker in decision latency for monolingual English readers (N = 54). A post hoc validation study with an independent sample of L1 English-speakers (n = 21) provided further evidence that the ungrammatical English sentences with German word order were indeed less natural and grammatically acceptable to L1 English-speakers than the grammatical English sentences. These findings suggest that, consistent with competition models of language comprehension, multiple languages are simultaneously active and can compete during syntactic processing. However, due to the complex nature of cross-language comparisons, the cross-language transfer effects are likely to be driven by multiple interacting factors, of which one is cross-language transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: This study investigated cross-linguistic influence and structural priming in L2 learners' comprehension of Dutch relative clauses (RCs) and PP-attachments. While PP-attachments are structurally ambiguous in all three languages, RCs are structurally ambiguous in Dutch and German, but not in English. Design/Methodology/Approach: L1 speakers of German (n = 18) and English (n = 19) completed a structural priming task in their L2 Dutch with a pre-test, a priming phase, an immediate post-test, and a delayed post-test 1 day later. Data and Analysis: The data were analysed using t tests and repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA). In the pre-test, L1 speakers of German showed a clear parsing preference for subject RCs and a slight preference for VP-attachment, whereas L1 speakers of English showed a clear parsing preference for object RCs and a slight preference for NP-attachment. The English L1 speakers were sensitive to structural priming, but only when primed with subject RCs and VP-attachments. This priming was still visible 1 day later. The German L1 speakers were not sensitive to the priming manipulation. Findings/Conclusion: The pre-test showed that L1 parsing preferences influence L2 processing; the structural priming effects in the English L1 speakers showed an inverse frequency effect that is based on experiences from both L1 and L2; the delayed post-test showed that structural priming can be seen as a form of implicit learning. Originality: This is the first structural priming study that compared two groups of L2 speakers on two different structures. Significance/Implications: Structural priming can be seen as a form of implicit learning in which experienced frequencies from both L1 and L2 give rise to a developing shared syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German skilled readers have been found to engage in morphological and syllable-based processing in visual word recognition. However, the relative reliance on syllables and morphemes in reading multi-syllabic complex words is still unresolved. This study aimed to unveil which of these sublexical units are the preferred units of reading by employing eye-tracking technology. Participants silently read sentences while their eye-movements were recorded. Words were visually marked using colour alternation (Experiment 1) or hyphenation (Experiment 2)—at syllable boundary (e.g., Kir-schen), at morpheme boundary (e.g., Kirsch-en), or within the units themselves (e.g., Ki-rschen). A control condition without disruptions was used as a baseline (e.g., Kirschen). The results of Experiment 1 showed that eye-movements were not modulated by colour alternations. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that hyphens disrupting syllables had a larger inhibitory effect on reading times than hyphens disrupting morphemes, suggesting that eye-movements in German skilled readers are more influenced by syllabic than morphological structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Krzysztof Mikulski's book, "Nicolaus Copernicus: Social Milieu, Background, and Youth," explores the social and economic environment that shaped Copernicus. The book focuses on the connections between the Watzenrode and Kopernik families in Toruń, where Copernicus was born and raised. Mikulski relies on documentary sources and published studies to provide a plausible account of Copernicus's dual German and Polish identity. While some details about Copernicus's youth remain disputed, Mikulski's book offers valuable insights into the life of the renowned astronomer. [Extracted from the article]

Aims and objectives: The current study examines the role of grammatical and positional parallelism on ambiguous German pronoun resolution in monolingual speakers and highly proficient L2 speakers with L1 Georgian. In particular, the study asks whether an object pronoun ihn in a sentence initial position could refer to the non-subject antecedent in a preceding subject–verb–object sentence. Furthermore, it investigates whether L1 and L2 speakers show similar preferences when resolving ambiguous object pronouns. Methodology: Two visual world eye-tracking and two offline experiments were conducted with L1 and L2 speakers of German. During the eye-tracking session, the task was simply to look and listen, while in the offline test, participants were required to decide on the assumed referent of the ambiguous pronoun. Data and analysis: Linear-mixed effect models were applied to the eye-movement data. Two-sample t tests were used in the analysis of the offline data. Findings and conclusions: Eye-movement results revealed a bias toward the subject antecedent in L1 speakers, while the L2 speakers showed a non-subject preference when resolving the referent of the object pronoun. The offline experiments supported the eye-tracking findings of both groups, particularly as regards the role of grammatical parallelism in the resolution of ambiguous pronouns by the L2 speakers. These findings are interpreted in the context of language-specific processing strategies in anaphora resolution. It appears that L1 and L2 speakers may be using different information-structural cues to resolve ambiguous pronouns. Concretely, a less strongly internalized knowledge of the target language or the influence of the first language may produce alternative processing mechanisms in L2 speakers. Originality: This study fills the research gap on ambiguous object pronoun resolution of L1 and L2 speakers of German. Implications: The findings of this study add additional information to the growing body of research into pronoun resolution. It focuses on the resolution of the German object pronoun within an information-structural framework of language processing in L1 and L2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Book Review: Alexander Batthyány, Viktor Frankl and the Shoah: Advancing the Debate Batthyány reports that when he asked Pytell about his methodological decision not to interview Frankl, Pytell responded that his research caused him to have "contempt" and feel "revulsion" for Frankl. Batthyány, Alexander Viktor Frankl and the Shoah: Advancing the Debate, Springer: Cham, Switzerland, 2021; x + 127 pp.: 9783030830625 (pbk) Ethical and trustworthy historical research methodologies and interpretations are at the core of Batthyány's[2] book, advancing a significant debate with historian Timothy Pytell. In addition, Batthyány emphasizes that although Frankl spent four days at Auschwitz, contextually and psychologically they may have been his most difficult as this was the camp where his mother was killed (Frankl dedicated I Man's Search for Meaning i to his mother) and those four days coincided with his wife's 24th birthday; they were separated, which Pytell omits. [Extracted from the article]

This explorative study investigates how book readers engage on Instagram within the platform-based reviewer sphere as part of the Bookstagram community. The communicative patterns and practices of online book reviews align with the communicative infrastructure of social media. The aim is to define and describe the communicative patterns and practices of online book reviewing under the changing conditions in a social media environment. The article analyzes a sample of the German-language reviewer sphere on Instagram in order to investigate a local formation of a global community. Based on a content analysis of posts (N= 514) from three thematic hashtags--#rezension ("review"), #buch ("book"), and #bookstagramgermany--, I will discuss the types of reviewers and analyze their content by the categories of platform affordances, imagery, textual forms, and review approach. The article contributes to the research of online book reviewing within communication and media studies by providing insight into the communication and review approaches of a niche-structured Instagram community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the results of an eye-tracking study investigating German children's comprehension of subject relative clauses (SRC) and object relative clauses (ORC) with morphologically unambiguous head and embedded noun phrases (NPs). The experimental paradigm was adopted from Adani and Fritzsche. Children's eye movements were tracked on the visual display while they were listening to an SRC or an ORC. Subsequently, they had to choose the most appropriate visual character on the screen to go with a particular relative clause type in a character selection paradigm. All the head NP and the embedded NPs were of masculine gender. Thus, the relative clause syntax was disambiguated by the ending on the relative pronoun and, subsequently, on the determiner in the embedded NP. We computed fixation probabilities towards the syntactic competitor and the embedded NP character in addition to the proportions of looks towards the target character on the screen. Thematic reversal error remained the dominant error type on children's response accuracy data. The subject advantage was also confirmed on the eye-tracking data, though it was overridden in the post-relative clause time window. However, there was a significant increase in fixation probabilities towards the embedded NP character in the ORC, but not in the SRC condition. While children were less efficient to use the morphological information on the relative pronoun to generate an expectation of a non-canonical ORC structure, they obviously used embedded NP morphology later in the sentence to update their ongoing structural analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To review the efficacy and safety of tannin albuminate and ethacridine lactate monohydrate in the treatment and prevention of diarrhea. Design: Narrative review. Data sources: A systematic literature search was conducted in MEDLINE and Embase from inception to September 2022. The search was restricted to English and German language publications. Eligibility criteria for selecting studies: Randomized controlled trials, non-interventional studies, and meta-analyses assessing tannin and/or ethacridine for the treatment or prevention of diarrhea. Results: Of 366 titles identified, a total of 13 studies were included in this review. Five randomized controlled trials and four noninterventional trials demonstrate the efficacy and safety of the fixed combination of tannin albuminate and ethacridine lactate monohydrate in treating acute diarrhea and preventing traveler's diarrhea. The fixed combination reduced acute diarrhea duration by improving stool frequency, consistency, and weight and reduced the risk of traveler's diarrhea. Two pilot studies indicate efficacy in chronic diarrhea. Safety and tolerability were very good in all included studies. Two meta-analyses investigated the efficacy of gelatin tannate in children with acute gastroenteritis. Conclusion: The efficacy and safety of tannin albuminate and ethacridine lactate monohydrate for the treatment of acute diarrhea and the prevention of traveler's diarrhea are proven in randomized controlled trials. Several noninterventional studies substantiate the real-world effectiveness and tolerability of the fixed combination. Both active ingredients combine antidiarrheal, antimicrobial, mucosal protection, and spasmolytic properties. However, existing clinical data should be updated with larger, well-designed, placebo-controlled trials in adult and pediatric patient populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalistic professionalism serves as a semantic tool for journalists to draw boundaries and to demarcate their profession. This research builds on Andrew Abbott's book The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, and his assessment of journalism as a 'permeable occupation'. By way of a strategic case study of a German-language news organization, it puts forth the notion of journalism as a profession of conditional permeability in certain participatory online settings. This research traces how journalists at a case organization used professionalism to delineate their own job from two groups of interlopers in online news spaces: Community managers tasked to moderate user comments, as well as audience members who participate by way of commenting on the news. The study draws on a case study of a market leader and early adopter in community management and comment moderation – with evident limitations as far as generalization to other contexts. Journalists used concepts deeply entrenched with journalistic professionalism, such as writing skills, gatekeeping and the application of news judgment to invoke boundaries between professionals and nonprofessionals, but also acknowledged unboundedness within particular subdomains of their work. While journalists asserted control over a journalistic epistemology, practice was partly open for other professionals, such as community managers, but closed for nonprofessionals. Some identified a hierarchy of professions, with community management serving an assistant function to journalism. The concept of conditional permeability accommodates both blurred boundaries towards other professional actors and distinct boundaries towards nonprofessional actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We developed an open-source training framework to practice conversation skills in a controlled and immersive virtual reality (VR) environment. Virtual characters with different biographies were developed with which a conversation using natural language is possible. The virtual characters integrate a dialog management system (ChatScript) to provide different biographical memories. Natural language processing for the German language is integrated by using Kaldi, an open-source speech recognition toolkit. As the framework allows for interchangeable content there are many different possible application cases to apply within the criminal justice system. The VR frameworks code is available under an open-source license. In this article, an overview of the framework's functionality is given as well as an outlook on possible areas of application. Statements about user acceptance and usability cannot yet be made, as relevant data have first to be gathered through a concrete application case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors present a revised version of the Acceptance of Modern Myths About Sexual Aggression scale (AMMSA-21) in four languages (English, German, Polish and Spanish) and examine its reliability and validity (total N = 1,459). AMMSA-21 addresses themes emerging in recent public discourse (e.g., beliefs about false accusations) and contents similar to the original scale (e.g., antagonism towards victims' demands); with 21 items, it is 30% shorter than the original. Factor analyses suggested that AMMSA-21 may be treated as a unidimensional construct. Across the four language versions, AMMSA-21 showed high internal consistency and criterion validity (positive correlations with hostile and benevolent sexism, social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism); its scores were unrelated to socially desirable responding. Also, AMMSA-21 predicted judgements of victim-blaming and rape proclivity in relation to acquaintance-rape scenarios. Mean differences across language versions (Spanish < English = German < Polish) are discussed in terms of cultural influences. In sum, AMMSA-21 represents a reliable, valid and economical measure of contemporary sexual aggression myths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender-fair language makes women and other genders, their interests, and their achievements more visible and is particularly relevant to grammatical gender languages such as German, in which most nouns and personal pronouns are assigned to a specific gender. The present study tested the often repeated critical claims that gender-fair language impairs the comprehensibility and aesthetic appeal of videos. In an experiment with N = 105 students, participants watched a video on self-determination theory, either with masculine-only forms or using the glottal stop, a form of spoken gender-fair language that inserts an abrupt and sustained closure of the vocal cords in the larynx between the masculine form or the stem and the feminine ending of words (e.g. in German "Leserʔinnen", ∼feʔmale readers). Subsequently, participants completed a questionnaire regarding the video's comprehensibility. The results show no statistically significant impairment regarding the general subjective comprehensibility (partial η 2 <.01), the ease of ascribing meaning to the words (partial η 2 <.01), the ease of decoding the syntax of the sentences (partial η 2 =.03), or the aesthetic appeal of the videos (partial η 2 =.02). The critics' claims are therefore questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Closely related Swedish and German both mark information status of referents morphologically, though little is known about its acquisition. This study investigates character introductions in the narratives of 4- and 6-year-old Swedish–German bilinguals (N = 40) in both languages, elicited with MAIN Cat/Dog. We analyse effects of age group, language and animacy (human vs nonhuman characters) on the type of referring expression (indefinite NP and pronoun), as well as effects of language proficiency and exposure on the use of indefinite NPs for each language. We also explore which syntactic constructions indefinite NPs occur in. A significant difference was found between the two age groups, but not between languages. No effect was found of language skills or exposure. Four-year-olds used more pronouns and a lower proportion of indefinite NPs than 6-year-olds. Pronouns were more frequent for the human character than for nonhuman animate characters. Whilst animacy (humanness) promoted the use of pronouns, it did not affect the choice of morphological form for lexical NPs (indefinite/definite). The age groups differed in how indefinite NPs were used. Four-year-olds produced fewer narrative presentations (where a character is introduced as part of a typical story opening, e.g. Once upon a time there was a cat) than 6-year-olds, and more labellings (with only an NP, or a clausal predicative, e.g. That's a cat). Qualitative analyses suggest that the children's indefinite NPs in labelling constructions can be both referential (when setting the narrative scene), and type-denoting (when naming referents in individual pictures). Whilst the children's abilities to introduce story characters develop measurably from 4 to 6 years in Swedish and German, appropriateness of character introductions not only depends on whether an indefinite NP is chosen, but also on the syntactic construction this indefinite NP is used in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief report summarizes the development and psychometric properties of German reading fluency passages as compared to English reading fluency passages for immersion language learners. Results indicated that scores from German language reading fluency passages alone were (a) somewhat less reliable than scores from English publisher-developed passages, (b) similarly valid measures of reading when compared to scores from English reading fluency passages, and (c) more accurate than publisher-provided English cut-scores but not as accurate as locally developed English cut-scores in the identification of at-risk readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harrisville, David A. The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944. Harrisville is less interested in how the post-war world saw the Wehrmacht than he is in how the soldiers who waged the I Vernichtungskrieg i (war of annihilation) in the East saw themselves. Book Review: The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944 by David A. Harrisville. [Extracted from the article]

Direct Behavior Rating (DBR) has been proposed as a promising approach to assess student behavioral progress in classroom settings. The current study examines raters and occasions as well as their interactions as sources of error in the use of DBR–Multi-Item Scales (DBR-MIS) and DBR–Single-Item Scales (DBR-SIS) for academically engaged (AE) and disruptive behavior (DB). Furthermore, the stability of scores across two school subjects (i.e., German language, mathematics) was examined. A total of 20 students and two teachers in an inclusive elementary school classroom participated in the study. Generalizability study results suggest that little variance in DBR scores was attributable to the facets of raters or occasions, but the interactions between persons with raters and occasions accounted for a large portion of variance. Variance attributable to these interactions was slightly higher for DBR-MIS than for DBR-SIS ratings. Decision studies revealed that dependable measurements of AE could be achieved within 1.5 weeks of daily ratings for absolute decision-making. Findings regarding DB were mixed. Differences across both school subjects were found indicating that DBR ratings that are obtained in one academic setting may not necessarily be exchangeable with ratings obtained in another. Overall, the results demonstrate the utility of DBR for behavioral progress-monitoring purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to examine language switching in a two-digit number naming task. In contrast to single digits, two-digit numbers have a composition rule (i.e., morphological configuration) that may differ between languages. For example, the Arabic number 21 is read with an inverted composition rule in German (unit before decade) and a non-inverted composition rule in English (decade before unit). In the present experiment, one group of German native speakers and one group of Spanish native speakers had to name two-digit numbers in German, English, or Spanish. The results demonstrate a language-switch cost, revealing better performance in language repetition than in language-switch trials. This switch cost was further modulated by repeating or switching the composition rule, since the language repetition benefit (i.e., the switch cost) was reduced in trials with composition-rule switches compared with trials with composition-rule repetitions. This finding indicates that the language in which the number word has to be produced and its composition rule are not switched independently but rather may be integrated into one language schema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: As bilingual students often achieve lower scores than monolinguals in single-language vocabulary assessments, a deficit-oriented view of bilingualism is widespread in educational institutions. This study examined whether this alleged difference remains when the conceptual vocabulary scores of bilingual primary students are considered, and when home language and literacy activities are taken into account. Methods: Extensive expressive vocabulary measures were administered in both the environmental language (German) and the heritage language (Turkish) to simultaneous and sequential bilingual students, and to their monolingual peers. Their parents provided information about the frequency of home language and literacy activities. Data: The study included 302 students (5;9–10;9 years). 83 were simultaneous bilingual, 55 sequential bilingual and 164 monolingual. Comparisons on vocabulary were conducted via separate multiple regression analyses with frequency of home language and literacy activities as a control variable. Findings: In single-language vocabulary scores of the environmental language, simultaneous and sequential bilingual students scored lower than monolinguals. In contrast, and most importantly, there were no differences between either bilingual group and monolinguals with regard to conceptual vocabulary and the relationship between conceptual vocabulary and frequency of home language and literacy activities. Controlling for frequency of home language and literacy activities did not change these findings. Originality: This study compared the expressive single-language and conceptual vocabulary scores of simultaneous and sequential bilinguals with the scores of monolinguals in a large sample of primary students, for the first time additionally controlling for home language and literacy activities, with the German and Turkish languages. Implications: Because bilingual students have the same conceptual vocabulary scores as monolinguals, lower single-language vocabulary scores do not reflect a language deficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leaders matter in international politics. One of the main tools for assessing at-a-distance psychological characteristics of political leaders is Leadership Trait Analysis. To facilitate empirical studies, a Leadership Trait Analysis coding scheme for automated text analysis was developed to replace hand-coding. However, the coding scheme has been available only for English-language texts. To broaden research opportunities, this article presents a novel Leadership Trait Analysis coding scheme for the German language. This coding scheme allows engaging in empirical analysis based on original German language sources, thereby shedding new or different light on German foreign policy. At the same time, it contributes to moving automated content analysis beyond the English language more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: This study investigates perceived accent in the two early-acquired languages of 21 adult-aged bilinguals with Italian as the heritage language (HL) and German as the majority language (ML). We test the relative ability of 'age of onset (AoO) in German' (range = 0–6 years) and 'Italian use' to predict perceived nativeness in Italian and German. Design/methodology/approach: Two accent rating experiments were carried out (one in each language) comparing the bilingual speech samples to those of monolingual and second language (L2) control groups. The samples were rated by German and Italian-speaking judges for foreign accent ('yes' or 'no') and for degree of certainty ('certain, 'semi-certain', 'uncertain'). Data and analysis: The effects of 'AoO in German' and 'Italian Use' (operationalized as an Italian Use Score) were analysed using correlational analyses and logistic regression. Findings/conclusions: Our results show that almost all bilinguals were indistinguishable from monolingual controls in German, and that their perceived accent in Italian lay somewhere between that of the monolingual and L2 controls. Based on regression analyses, we conclude that a later introduction of the ML has neither a negative effect on the ML itself, nor does it show up advantages in the HL. Instead, how native-like the heritage speakers (HSs) sound in the HL largely depends on HL use. No negative effects of HL use are found for German. Originality: We test a new population of Italian HSs in South Germany and compare these results to findings from other HS populations in Germany. Significance/implications: This study shows that, although it may be the case for child-aged bilinguals that introducing the ML earlier causes more phonological pressure on the HL, this effect seems to have disappeared by adulthood – at least with regards to perceived global accent. Also, accent in the HL depends on HL use across the lifespan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Jan Pappelbaum, what fascinated him and Thomas Ostermeier about 'reconstructed' Globe Theatres is that '[i]t becomes impossible to ignore the presence of the audience; actors are particularly exposed and entirely at the mercy of the spectators'. This article investigates the spatial politics that emerge from/within the 'quasi-reconstructed' Globe for Ostermeier's production of Richard III. Examining a 2017 performance of the play at London's Barbican Theatre, I consider how audience interaction (and the potential for theatrical failure in that interaction, specifically through performative silence) becomes the site of political resistance in the context of theatrical performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: This paper investigates the extent to which current formal models of third language (L3) grammatical acquisition extend to sequential child L3 acquisition. We examine whether heritage speakers learning a foreign language as an early L3 transfer grammatical properties from the heritage language or the dominant second language (L2). Design/Methodology/Approach: We used a sentence repetition task and a picture story retelling task. The tasks focussed on grammatical phenomena that were either different between English and German, that is, verb-second and adverb order, or between English and German, on the one hand, and Turkish, on the other, that is, verb-complement order as well as subject and article realization. Data and Analysis: We tested matched groups of 31 Turkish-German and 31 monolingual German children learning English in grades 3 and 4, and we compared sentence repetitions as well as oral sentence production across different grammatical phenomena using parametric statistics. Findings/Conclusions: In both tasks, the two groups perform indistinguishably from each other, and both groups show selective transfer of grammatical properties from German. These findings suggest L2 transfer from a typologically related language in sequential child L3 acquisition. Originality: This paper breaks new ground by testing the applicability of formal models of adult L3 acquisition of grammar to sequential child L3 learners. It uses aural comprehension and oral production tasks with carefully matched groups of L2 and L3 learners of English to isolate the source of grammatical transfer in L3 acquisition. Significance/Implications: The research advances our understanding of cross-linguistic influence and unravels the dynamics of grammatical transfer in early child multilingualism. It adjudicates between current models of transfer in L3 acquisition in a multiple-methods design, it shows that these models apply to early L3 acquisition of heritage speakers, and it highlights that these models need to be expanded to include factors such as dominance and proficiency in prior languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives: Differences in directionality, motivations and locus of codeswitching have been reported for children's codeswitching, but these constructs have not been subjected to experimental study in order to examine how they may interact. This study investigated these variables in bilingual preschool children's codeswitching. Methodology: Thirty-two Russian-Hebrew bilingual children (mean age 6;3) performed two tasks: Retelling of narratives manipulated for setting/topic and listener and Conversation with a bilingual adult. Retelling conditions included a Russian story retold to a Hebrew-speaking puppet, a Hebrew story retold to a Russian speaking puppet and a Mixed language story retold to a bilingual puppet. The Conversation task involved responses to questions in Russian, Hebrew and codeswitched speech about holidays and activities at home and in preschool. Data and Analysis: All children's speech was audio recorded and transcribed using CHILDES conventions for data transcription. Codeswitched utterances were coded for the following: Directionality (Hebrew-to-Russian/Russian-to-Hebrew); Motivation (psycholinguistic/sociopragmatic); and Locus (intra-utterance/cross-speaker). Results: Overall children produced more codeswitching from Russian to Hebrew and did so more for psycholinguistic motivations (to maintain fluency or to overcome difficulties in lexical access). Originality: High rates of codeswitching occurred in this study, ranging from 15% to 22% for Conversation and Retelling, respectively (calculated as codeswitched instances per utterance). This high rate may be attributed to the experimental nature of the tasks, which intended to elicit codeswitching in children's speech. Significance: Drawing from Green and Wei's processing model, findings regarding directionality and motivation are discussed in terms of connectivity and activation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives: We investigate how varying usage patterns in speakers of closely related language varieties might impact executive function. More specifically, bidialectals with more balanced usage were predicted to show better inhibitory control than less balanced bidialectals. Design: Thirty-four adult bidialectals of Standard German and Swabian German performed two executive function tasks (flanker and Simon). Data and analysis: The participants' reaction times on the two executive function tasks were analysed using regression models. Data and R code are available online. Findings: Contrary to predictions, Swabian-dominant bidialectals showed smaller flanker and Simon effects than balanced German-Swabian bidialectals. Furthermore, contrary to some previous studies, executive function task performances correlated significantly. Originality: We discuss how bidialectal language usage patterns can be assessed and how arbitrary analytical decisions affect findings regarding the effects of bidialectalism on executive function. Significance: These findings shed a new light on the effects of bilingualism/bidialectalism on executive function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research questions: German and Spanish differ in lexicalization of object position in placement events (e.g. They stand/lay-put the binoculars on the shelf). Do native (L1) speakers of these languages show different recognition memory for object position in placement scenes ("Thinking for Speaking" (TFS))? And if so, can learning German as a second language (L2) improve memory accuracy? Originality: There is very little research on the effect of language on memory in L2 speakers and no such studies have focused on placement events. By adopting a short time course (750 ms) between the prime and recognition phase this study makes a methodological advancement. Design/Methodology/Approach: We employed a design with L1 speakers (N = 54) of German and Spanish, and a group of Spanish L2 learners (N = 123) of German. Participants were presented with a two-phased memory task with minimum delay, with language and pictures showing placement events. Following the direction indicated by German placement verbs we changed position of objects in the picture recognition phase. L2 German speakers received a form-focused instruction on German placement verbs (stand/lay) before the memory task. Data and Analysis: We analysed recognition accuracy for object position changes. Findings/Conclusions: Results showed that L1 German speakers had more accurate recognition memory for object position changes than L1 Spanish speakers. When Spanish learners of L2 German performed the experiment in German, their accuracy exceeded L1 German speakers' scores. Significance/Implications: The findings provide support for TFS effects on memory for object position in placement events for L1 speakers and show accuracy advantages for L2 speakers. Future studies should consider employing tasks with short time courses as the one used in this paper, in order to establish a base of controlled and reliable findings to unravel the linguistic relativity literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Stress "deafness" is a difficulty in the detection of stress pattern changes of second language (L2) words. This study investigated the influence of cognitive factors and L2 proficiency on the processing of L2 stress. Methodology: Fifty-four native speakers of Hungarian, a language with non-contrastive stress, participated in the study; the participants were categorized as not speaking German or having a proficiency at the intermediate or advanced level. They had to recall sequences with increasing length consisting of German pseudowords that differed in either their phonemes (phoneme task) or stress patterns (stress task). Cognitive factors measured included working memory, phonological awareness and inhibitory control. Data and Analysis: The accuracy data obtained in the sequence recall task was analysed with generalized linear mixed modelling. Two separate analyses were performed to investigate the presence of stress "deafness" and the effect of cognitive factors. Findings: Results showed that the stress task led to lower performance than the phoneme task, irrespective of L2 proficiency. Furthermore, the analysis showed different cognitive factors contributing to the performance in the tasks: in the phoneme task, it was working memory, phonological awareness and inhibitory control, while in the stress task, it was only working memory and phonological awareness but not the inhibitory control. Originality: This is the first study to provide evidence about the cognitive background of the stress "deafness" effect, and to suggest the differential role of inhibitory control in phoneme and stress processing. Implications: These findings demonstrate the robustness of the stress "deafness" effect in a language with non-contrastive stress, provide evidence of the effect being independent of L2 proficiency and suggest that speakers of languages with non-contrastive stress do not have the necessary cognitive basis to form accurate L2 stress representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and Objectives: Studies on vowel productions of speakers from bilingual communities report not only interactions between the first and second language, but also monolingual-like realizations. The present study expands a prior acoustic investigation of Saterland trilinguals by studying the substrate effect of Saterland Frisian and Low German on the trilinguals' standard language Northern Standard German. The research aim is to test whether the Northern Standard German vowel productions of the Saterland trilinguals approach the productions of monolingual speakers in terms of durational and spectral features. Design: We elicited three repetitions per speaker of the complete inventory of stressed Northern Standard German monophthongs in /hVt/ context to compare the realizations of Northern Standard German vowels in trilingual speakers from Saterland and in monolingual speakers from Hanover, whose variety of Northern Standard German is representative of the larger speech community. Data and analysis: In an acoustic analysis, we compared the durational and spectral features using linear mixed effects models. The findings are interpreted with reference to the cross-linguistic vowel productions of the trilingual speakers. Findings: For the larger part, the Northern Standard German vowel productions of the trilinguals approach the productions of the monolingual speakers in terms of both durational and spectral features. In addition, the vowel productions of the trilingual speakers suggest a bidirectional interaction between the vowel systems of the trilinguals' three languages. Originality: This investigation is the first to study phonetic interference in vowel production in a situation of long-term language contact involving regional trilingualism and an endangered minority language. Implications: Our findings show an orientation towards the larger speech community in the realization of vowel categories in the trilinguals' standard language. Our study also suggests that the complete inventory needs to be studied to understand the functional constraints by which the multilingual vowel space is organized. It further suggests that a comparison of multilingual with monolingual speakers is necessary to draw conclusions on the mutual subphonemic influence of the individual vowel systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of the lexicon and grammatical structure building in early grammar. Parent-report data in CDI format from a sample of 1151 German-speaking children between 1;6 and 2;6 and longitudinal spontaneous speech data from 22 children between 1;8 and 2;5 were used. Regression analysis of the parent-report data indicates that grammatical words have a stronger influence on concurrent syntactic complexity than lexical words. Time-lagged correlations using the spontaneous speech data showed that lexical words at 1;8 predict subsequent MLU at 2;1 significantly; grammatical words do not. MLU at 2;5 is significantly predicted by grammatical words and no longer by lexical words. The influence of different grammatical subcategories on subsequent MLU varies. Use of articles and the copula at 2;1 most strongly predicts MLU at 2;5. Children use both types of articles and multiple determiners before a noun to the same extent as adults. The present results are suggestive of early grammatical structure building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children in Austria are exposed to a large amount of variation within the German language. Most children grow up with a local dialect, German standard language and ‘intermediate’ varieties summarized as ‘Umgangssprache’. Using an ABX design, this study analyses when Austrian children are able to discriminate native varieties of their L1 German (standard German vs local dialect). The results show children’s early ability to register differences and similarities on an across-speaker level when sentences are held constant (i.e. to discriminate translation equivalents in the two varieties) and a later, rather sudden emergence of more abstract categories of the varieties, which encompass different phonological and lexical variables and enable children to match sentences which also differ lexically. In sum, discrimination ability seems to be relatively stable and consistent at the age of 8/9. Other than age, the mother’s educational background, language variation at home and the immediate sociolinguistic setting (urban/rural) predict children’s discrimination performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-1990s, inclusion was introduced into discussions on education; today, we still do not have a precisely defined concept of inclusion. This article focuses its attention in this context on Germany, which in ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009 embarked on the path towards realising an inclusive system of education. The question examined here is what theoretical–conceptual ideas concerning the inclusion approach can be found in the scientific-legal discourse in the German-speaking region and to what extent have these found their way into school praxis. Furthermore, an attempt is undertaken to assign the ideas people working practically in the school system have about inclusion to the definition categories of the recently published attempt at systematisation by Göransson and Nilholm. The results suggest that the definition categories can also be applied to the German context. In line with the academic discourse, inclusion is interpreted in conceptual terms differently by school administrators and teaching staff. Inclusion is mainly understood in relation to the educational sector and has no clear alignment in terms of the target group in question. Clear differentiation criteria concerning the implications of how inclusion is understood are the school form in which teachers are employed, the prior experience of integrative/inclusive teaching and the function they fulfil in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poetic form in the 1960s in Britain, and elsewhere, was affected by trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural influences that came fully into focus after the end of the Second World War. These were substantially iterated and theorized throughout the 1950s, paving the way for radical experiments in language during the following decade. Drawing on Paul Celan’s observation that poetry maintains itself ‘at its own extremity’ (expanded by Lyon [1983. “Poetry and the Extremities of Language: From Concretism to Paul Celan.”Studies in 20th Century Literature8 (1): Article 5. Accessed September 20, 2016. doi:10.4148/2334-4415.1131] and Klink [2000. “You. An Introduction to Paul Celan.”The Iowa Review30 (1): 1–18. http://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview/vol30/iss1/2], this article considers movement in the form and language of poetry in the post-war period. It looks at some specific examples of how this became manifest in Britain and at traversal connections to developments within other disciplines, not least in scientific and technological domains. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Linguistic relativity—the idea that language affects thought by way of its grammatical categorizations—has been controversially debated for decades. One of the contested cases is the grammatical gender of nouns, which is claimed to affect how their referents are conceptualized (i.e., as rather female or male in congruence with the grammatical gender of the noun), especially when used allegorically. But is this association strong enough to be detected in implicit measures, and, if so, can we disentangle effects of grammatical gender and allegorical association? Three experiments with native speakers of German tackled these questions. They revealed a gender congruency effect on allegorically used nouns, but this effect was stronger with an explicit measure (assignment of biological sex) than with an implicit measure (Extrinsic Affective Simon Task) and disappeared in the implicit measure when grammatical gender and allegorical associations were set into contrast. Taken together, these findings indicate that the observed congruency effect was driven by the association of nouns with personifications rather than by their grammatical gender. In conclusion, we also discuss implications of these findings for linguistic relativity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Given that translation is always an imperfect process, why do people single out certain words as simply untranslatable? This article looks at one such supposedly untranslatable term, the German word Wissenschaft. Rather than take the word’s status as a given, it examines the historical processes through which Wissenschaft came to be seen as a word impossible to render into English. The article examines a mid-nineteenth century debate about Francis Bacon to show that as late as the 1860s “science” and “Wissenschaft” were still treated as comparable terms. Wissenschaft began to seem untranslatable only later in the nineteenth century, as part of a critique that set German national character in opposition to the supposedly shallow materialism of the British. After this initial divergence, scholars in the twentieth century continued to elaborate on the difference between the terms, with lasting implications for our retrospective understandings of nineteenth-century intellectual life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the robustness of the spatial–numerical association of response codes (SNARC) and linguistic markedness of response codes (MARC) effect, the mechanisms that underlie these effects are still under debate. In this paper, we investigate the extraction of quantity information from German number words and nouns inflected for singular and plural using two alternative forced choice paradigms. These paradigms are applied to different tasks to investigate how access to quantity representation is modulated by task demands. In Experiment 1, we replicated previous SNARC findings for number words—that is, a relative left-hand advantage for words denoting small numbers and a right-hand advantage for words denoting large numbers in semantic tasks (parity decision and quantity comparison). No SNARC effect was obtained for surface or lexical processing tasks (font categorization and lexical decision). In Experiment 2, we found that German words inflected for singular had a relative left-hand advantage, and German words inflected for plural a relative right-hand advantage, showing a SNARC-like effect for grammatical number. The effect interfered, however, with a MARC-like effect based on the markedness asymmetry of singulars and plurals. These two effects appear to be dissociated by response latency rather than task demands, with MARC being more pronounced in early responses and SNARC being more pronounced in late responses. The present findings shed light on the relationship of conceptual number and grammatical number and constrain current accounts of the SNARC and MARC effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examined lexical-phonological interactions in the first 50 words of a group of monolingual German- and Spanish-speaking children and bilingual German–Spanish children. The phonological characteristics of the earliest target word forms and output patterns of these children were analyzed to determine whether bilingual children select different target word forms and produce different output forms and templates than monolingual children. Results indicated that the target word forms selected by Spanish-speaking children differed from German-speaking children but not the target word forms of monolingual versus bilingual children. Output forms differed between monolingual German and Spanish children but did not differ greatly between the two languages of the bilingual children. The output patterns of bilingual children also differed from those of monolingual children. Bilingual children’s earliest words contained more /l/s and variegated place and their templates were characterized by more mature phonological forms. These patterns were interpreted as being due to cross-linguistic interaction or to a more general effect of bilingualism, which leads to increased phonetic-phonological sophistication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three experiments are reported that studied the priming of word order in German. Experiment 1 demonstrated priming of the order of case-marked verb arguments. However, order of noun phrases and order of thematic roles were confounded. In Experiment 2, we therefore aimed at disentangling the impact of these two possible factors. By using primes that differed from targets in phrase structure but were parallel with regard to the order of thematic roles, we nevertheless found priming demonstrating the critical impact of thematic roles. Experiment 3 replicated the priming effects from Experiments 1 and 2 within participants and revealed no evidence for a modulation of priming by phrase structure. Consequently, our findings suggest that word order priming crucially depends on the structural outline of thematic roles rather than on the linearization of phrases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses longitudinal diary data from one infant acquiring German to seek a better understanding of the role of onomatopoeia in early language development. Onomatopoeic words (OWs) are traced over time in relation to their corresponding conventional forms (CWs), and an analysis of their phonological transitions is considered in relation to the infant’s wider language development. OWs are found to serve as a bootstrapping mechanism on a lexical as well as a phonological level, and a lexical OW ‘template’ is proposed, which is found to support phonological development throughout the infant’s output. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]