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Purpose Adults with mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss typically exhibit issues with speech understanding, but their processing of syntactically complex sentences is not well understood. We test the hypothesis that listeners with hearing loss' difficulties with comprehension and processing of syntactically complex sentences are due to the processing of degraded input interfering with the successful processing of complex sentences. Method We performed a neuroimaging study with a sentence comprehension task, varying sentence complexity (through subject–object order and verb–arguments order) and cognitive demands (presence or absence of a secondary task) within subjects. Groups of older subjects with hearing loss ( n = 20) and age-matched normal-hearing controls ( n = 20) were tested. Results The comprehension data show effects of syntactic complexity and hearing ability, with normal-hearing controls outperforming listeners with hearing loss, seemingly more so on syntactically complex sentences. The secondary task did not influence off-line comprehension. The imaging data show effects of group, sentence complexity, and task, with listeners with hearing loss showing decreased activation in typical speech processing areas, such as the inferior frontal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus. No interactions between group, sentence complexity, and task were found in the neuroimaging data. Conclusions The results suggest that listeners with hearing loss process speech differently from their normal-hearing peers, possibly due to the increased demands of processing degraded auditory input. Increased cognitive demands by means of a secondary visual shape processing task influence neural sentence processing, but no evidence was found that it does so in a different way for listeners with hearing loss and normal-hearing listeners.

Referential dependencies for pronouns and reflexives can be established at different linguistic levels. According to the economy hierarchy of dependencies, syntactic dependencies are ‘cheaper’ than semantic dependencies, which are ‘cheaper’ than discourse dependencies. Psycholinguistic research on English and Dutch has shown that the interpretation of reflexives for which discourse operations are needed (i.e., in locative prepositional phrases) is computationally more costly than the interpretation of coargument reflexives that are based on syntactic dependencies only. Similarly, semantic bound variable interpretation has been shown to be less computationally demanding than discourse-based coreference interpretation. The current study investigates these dependencies in German and replicates the finding that semantic bound variable interpretation is cheaper than discourse-based coreference interpretation. In contrast and as predicted by theoretical accounts that postulate a close relationship of the verb and preposition in German that yields chain formation, no difference was found for the reflexives, supporting the idea that reflexives in prepositional phrases in German depend on the same interpretive mechanisms as coargument reflexives, indicating that the underlying syntactic configuration differs from that in other Germanic languages.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the processing of morphosyntactic cues (case and verb agreement) by children with cochlear implants (CIs) in German which -questions, where interpretation depends on these morphosyntactic cues. The aim was to examine whether children with CIs who perceive the different cues also make use of them in speech comprehension and processing in the same way as children with normal hearing (NH). Method Thirty-three children with CIs (age 7;01–12;04 years;months, M = 9;07, bilaterally implanted before age 3;3) and 36 children with NH (age 7;05–10;09 years, M = 9;01) received a picture selection task with eye tracking to test their comprehension of subject, object, and passive which -questions. Two screening tasks tested their auditory discrimination of case morphology and their perception and comprehension of subject–verb agreement. Results Children with CIs who performed well on the screening tests still showed more difficulty on the comprehension of object questions than children with NH, whereas they comprehended subject questions and passive questions equally well as children with NH. There was large interindividual variability within the CI group. The gaze patterns of children with NH showed reanalysis effects for object questions disambiguated later in the sentence by verb agreement, but not for object questions disambiguated by case at the first noun phrase. The gaze patterns of children with CIs showed reanalysis effects even for object questions disambiguated at the first noun phrase. Conclusions Even when children with CIs perceive case and subject–verb agreement, their ability to use these cues for offline comprehension and online processing still lags behind normal development, which is reflected in lower performance rates and longer processing times. Individual variability within the CI group can partly be explained by working memory and hearing age. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7728731

This Event Related Potentials (ERP) study investigates auditory processing of sentences with so-called code-switches in Russian learners of German. It has often been argued that switching between two languages results in extra processing cost, although it is not completely clear yet what exactly causes these costs. ERP presents a good method to (start to) answer this question, since different ERP effects provide insight in the underlying processes that take place. We presented three groups of speakers (German first-language speakers, Russian speakers with intermediate and Russian speakers with very good knowledge of German as a second language) with German sentences that either ended ‘normally’ i.e. with a word that fitted the meaning of the sentence, or with a semantically unexpected word, or with the Russian translation of the semantically normal German word. Comparing the two groups of Russian speakers allows for examining the influence of proficiency on the processing of code-switches. The results showed that the semantically unexpected word elicited an N400 in both the first language (L1) and the more proficient second language (L2) group, but not in the less proficient L2 group. Code-switches resulted in an N400-like pattern in all three groups, and also in a Late Positive Component (LPC), which was most pronounced in the less proficient L2 group. This positivity is, although somewhat later, quite similar to the well-known P300 effect that is found with stimuli with unexpected external properties.

Various types of morphological information can serve as cues to assist comprehension and production of complex sentences, i.e., case and/or gender information. These cues are realized differently in different languages, and thus might have different effects. We examined the effects of case and gender information on comprehension and repetition of wh-questions and topicalization sentences, for German- and Hebrew-speaking typically developing children, and compared between the two languages. The participants were typically developing children, 3–6;8 years old, German- and Hebrew-speaking. Comprehension was examined using a picture-matching task and production by using a repetition task. In half of the sentences the two figures were of the same gender and in half – of different genders. In Hebrew this difference manifests on verb agreement and in German – on the determiner. We compared between the children's performance on the different types of sentences, and between sentences with and without the gender/case cues. Findings show the classical subject–object asymmetry in comprehension and repetition, and display a difference between German and Hebrew in the way cues assist comprehension and repetition. We argue that the difference between the facilitating effect of gender and case information relates to whether it is realized on subject–verb agreement or not.

This study compares speech production data of agrammatic aphasic speakers in Dutch, German, and English to examine the relative importance of different properties of determiners and pronouns (such as case, gender, definiteness) in these three languages. Agrammatic aphasic speakers omit determiners and use relatively few pronouns in their speech production. Ruigendijk (2007) compared Dutch and German-speaking agrammatic speakers’ performance and showed that the German group omitted more determiners. The current study adds data from English-speaking agrammatic aphasics to test the hypothesis that the more severe problems in German agrammatism were caused by case morphology, which is not present on Dutch and English determiners. The results show that English patterns with Dutch, and thus support the hypothesis that it is case morphology that makes the German determiners more problematic.

To allow for a systematic variation of linguistic complexity of sentences while acoustically controlling for intelligibility of sentence fragments, a German corpus, Oldenburg linguistically and audiologically controlled sentences (OLACS), was designed, implemented, and evaluated. Sentences were controlled for plausibility with a questionnaire survey. Verification of the speech material was performed in three listening conditions (quiet, stationary, and fluctuating noise) by collecting speech reception thresholds (SRTs) and response latencies as well as individual cognitive measures for 20 young listeners with normal hearing. Consistent differences in response latencies across sentence types verified the effect of linguistic complexity on processing speed. The addition of noise decreased response latencies, giving evidence for different response strategies for measurements in noise. Linguistic complexity had a significant effect on SRT. In fluctuating noise, this effect was more pronounced, indicating that fluctuating noise correlates with stronger cognitive contributions. SRTs in quiet correlated with hearing thresholds, whereas cognitive measures explained up to 40% of the variance in SRTs in noise. In conclusion, OLACS appears to be a suitable tool for assessing the interaction between aspects of speech understanding (including cognitive processing) and speech intelligibility in German.

Theoretical accounts of the language production process have claimed that grammatical encoding steps during the formulation stage happen in a largely automatic fashion, unimpeded by other cognitive processes. By eliciting agreement attraction errors, our study tested the effect of external distractor noise on the generation of subject–verb agreement in spoken language. We modelled noisy environments with three different speech-free sounds with spectral, or both spectral and intensity modulation characteristics of speech. In silence and unmodulated noise, we found evidence for a plural mismatch effect, where a plural local noun attracts agreement away from a singular marked head noun. Under modulated noise the error patterns changed, and the number of errors increased in cases where the head noun of the preamble was marked for plural. In addition, background noise led to a reduction of speech rate and a reduction of utterance latency. Our results indicate that unspecific, speech-free noise can create a secondary task load which exerts an influence on the grammatical encoding stage of sentence formulation. We suggest that additional load leads to a slowing down of processing and subsequent difficulty to access the correct number information of the head noun when trying to retrieve an inflected verb form. Subjects overcome this difficulty by resorting to default singular marking on the verb. The results of this study challenge previous claims about the informational encapsulation of the grammatical encoding stage.

We investigated if linguistic complexity contributes to the variation of the speech reception threshold in noise (SRTN) and thus should be employed as an additional design criterion in sentence tests used for audiometry.Three test lists were established with sentences from the Göttingen sentence test ( KollmeierWesselkamp, 1997 ). One list contained linguistically simple sentences, the other two lists contained sentences with two types of linguistic complexity. For each listener the SRTN was determined for each list.Younger and older listeners with normal hearing and older listeners with hearing impairment were tested.Younger listeners with normal hearing showed significantly worse SRTNs on the complex lists than on the simple list. This difference could not be found for either of the older groups.The effect of linguistic complexity on speech recognition seems to depend on age and/or hearing status. Hence, pending further research, linguistic complexity seems less relevant as a sentence test design criterion for clinical-audiological purposes, but we argue that a test with larger variation in linguistic complexity across sentences might show a relation between linguistic complexity and speech recognition even in a clinical population.

Both German children and adults acquiring Dutch as a second language are tested on their production of determiners and adjectival inflection in attributive position. Both groups tend to overgeneralise the common determiner (de). Children overgeneralise the inflected adjective, while adults make mistakes in two directions: they overgeneralise both the inflected and the uninflected adjective. This age effect is reminiscent of what is found for L2 learners of Dutch with a Turkish and a Moroccan Arabic background (see Blom, Polišenská & Weerman 2006, 2008b), but there are differences as well. The most conspicuous difference is that the German children seem on the right track with respect to the uninflected adjective, whereas the Turkish and Moroccan Arabic children fossilise the inflected variant. It is argued that the L1 background cannot explain this difference and in general only plays a marginal role in the acquisition of Dutch determiners and adjectival inflection. Instead it is suggested that the quality and the quantity of the Dutch input plays a role, alongside the age difference.

Omission and substitution of articles have often been mentioned as characteristics of agrammatic speech. In these descriptions, articles are considered to be so-called function words or closed-class words . These are supposed to be difficult for agrammatic speakers. From a linguistic point of view, the class of function words is far from homogeneous and even within the class of articles different linguistic properties can be distinguished. In many languages — Dutch, German, Italian and Portuguese are used as examples in this paper — the article is specified for gender. In German the article is specified for case as well. Gender and case differ from both a linguistic and a psycholinguistic point of view. Gender information is part of the word form. In some languages, gender can be derived from the word-form (as in Portuguese or Italian), while in other languages, the gender of nouns is stored as part of the word-form (as in Dutch and German). Case is a syntactic notion and relates to a dependency between the constituents in a sentence. Bearing in mind the fact that article production is impaired in agrammatic Broca's aphasia, one may wonder whether gender and/or case information plays a role here. For the present study, article production of nine Dutch and ten German individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia has been analyzed and the data show that most substitution errors concern case; the gender of the produced articles is usually correct. This supports the hypothesis that agrammatic speech is the consequence of an underlying deficit in syntactic processing.