Projects
Ongoing
The semantics of pronouns, role nouns, and genericity
(with Viktoria Schneider, Janina Esser)
How gender-neutral are supposedly gender-neutral masculine generics in German, is singular they in English truly singular and gender-neutral? Such questions are investigated in this project using computational methods, especially naive and linear discriminative learning.
Form and meaning in English compounds: the role of prosody
(with Ingo Plag)
Using the framework of the Discriminative Lexicon Model to investigate, this project investigates the idea that stress patterns in compounds emerge through developing associations between form and meaning in a process of discriminative learning.
Cuteness effects in sound symbolism
(with Defne Cicek, Anh Kim Nguyen, Daniel Rottleb)
Research on sound symbolism of the last decades has produced findings on size sound symbolism time and time again. However, rarely further visual dimensions were accounted for in analyses. This project focuses on one of such dimensions: cuteness.
Final S in German – Morphological effects in speech production
(with Dinah Baer-Henney)
This project explores whether word-final /s/ in German shows similar effects of morphological category as were found for word-final /s/ in English. That is, do different types of German word-final /s/ come with different acoustic durations?
Learning S – Duration as a key to morphology
(with Dinah Baer-Henney)
This project investigates whether differentiating morphological categories based on subphonemic cues is learnable in artificial languages. Is morphological structure not only part of production but also a cue to learning?
Typing S – Morphology between the keys
(with Julia Muschalik, Dinah Baer-Henney)
This project explores whether findings from typing resemble those from production on word-final /s/ in English. Is morphological structure not only found in articulation but also through typing and if so, how do differences between different types of /s/ play out?
Completed
Final S in English: The role of acoustic detail in morphological processing
(with Ingo Plag, Dinah Baer-Henney)
In this DFG-funded project we found that types of word-final /s/ in English, which have different morphological functions, come with unique durations. Non-morphemic /s/ is longest, followed by suffix /s/, which in turn is followed by clitic /s/. A carefully designed production study confirmed previous corpus findings. In two comprehension studies we showed that these durational differences also affect comprehension. → official website