In this paper, the meaning and processing of the German conditional connectives (CCs) such as "wenn" 'if' and "nur wenn" 'only if' are investigated. In Experiment 1, participants read short scenarios containing a conditional sentence (i.e., If P, Q.) with "wenn"/"nur wenn" 'if/only if' and a confirmed or…

Studies on young children's comprehension have shown that children can experience problems interpreting object pronouns, even when reflexive interpretation is already adult-like. Compared to resolving reflexives, linking pronouns to a referent is considered a more "intensive" process, because it also involves non-syntactic factors like…

This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and…

Informally speaking, presuppositions are meaning components which are part of the common ground for speakers in a conversation, that is, background information which is taken for granted by interlocutors. The current literature suggests an immediate processing of presuppositions, starting directly on the word triggering the presupposition. In the…

Upon hearing a novel label, listeners tend to assume that it refers to a novel, rather than a familiar object. While this disambiguation or mutual exclusivity (ME) effect has been robustly shown across development, it is unclear what it involves. Do listeners use their pragmatic and lexical knowledge to exclude the familiar object and thus select…

This study investigates the interpretation of object-initial sentences in German-speaking children. We addressed the following questions: (1) Which morphosyntactic cues do children deploy to process object-initial sentences? (2) Which executive function (EF) abilities support them during this task? This study examined the effect of case and number…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…

In this study, we investigated effects of morphological processing on handwriting production in beginning writers of German. Children from Grades 3 and 4 were asked to copy words from a computer screen onto a pen tablet, while we recorded their handwriting with high spatiotemporal resolution. Words involved a syllable-congruent visual disruption…

This study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction (PI) on the acquisition of grammatical gender and gender-marked pronouns in German. PI was compared to Traditional Instruction, i.e. a traditional, vocabulary-oriented approach using color cues (TI) and a Categorization and Memorization task (CM). The results of an immediate posttest…

Word forms such as "walked" or "walker" are decomposed into their morphological constituents (walk + -ed/-er) during language comprehension. Yet, the efficiency of morphological decomposition seems to vary for different languages and morphological types, as well as for first and second language speakers. The current study…

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement-clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief…

This study presents a reanalysis of existing data to investigate whether a relationship between perception and production abilities regarding a challenging second-language (L2) phonological contrast is observable (a) when both modalities must rely on accessing stored lexical representations and (b) when there is an asymmetry in task focus between…

Existing work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children's…

This study investigates the hypothesis that non-isomorphic syntax-semantics mappings pose a greater challenge for non-native (L2) than for native (L1) speakers, focusing on a previously understudied phenomenon. We carried out an antecedent judgment task with L1 German and L1 Russian-speaking, proficient L2 learners of German to examine Condition C…

While monolingual speakers can use contrastive pitch accents to predict upcoming referents, bilingual speakers do not always use this cue predictively in their L2. The current study examines the role of recent exposure for predictive processing in native German (L1) second language learners of English (L2). In Experiment 1, participants followed…