Purpose: Our goal is to understand how the different types of plural marking are understood and processed by children with cochlear implants (CIs): (a) how does salience affect the processing of plural marking, (b) how is this processing affected by the incomplete signal provided by the CIs, and (c) is it linked to individual factors such as…

Second language (L2) learners often speak with a strong accent, which can make them difficult to understand. However, familiarity with an accent enhances intelligibility. We propose that L2 learners are even more familiar with their own accented speech patterns and may thus understand self-produced L2 words better than others' accented…

Purpose: This study examines the temporal organization of vocalic anticipation in German children from 3 to 7 years of age and adults. The main objective was to test for nonlinear processes in vocalic anticipation, which may result from the interaction between lingual gestural goals for individual vowels and those for their neighbors over time.…

Recent studies suggest that infants' audiovisual speech perception is influenced by articulatory experience (Mugitani et al., 2008; Yeung & Werker, 2013). The current study extends these findings by testing if infants' emerging ability to produce native sounds in babbling impacts their audiovisual speech perception. We tested 44 6-month-olds…

Background: In 2012 the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) was published as a parent-report screening assessment that considers parents' perceptions of their children's functional intelligibility with a range of communication partners that differ in levels of authority and familiarity in real-life situations. To date, the ICS has been…

This study investigates the role of orthography in German vowel production by Polish native speakers (L1) with German as a second language (L2). Eighteen intermediate to advanced Polish L2 German learners and 20 German native speakers were recorded during a picture-naming task in which half of the experimental items were explicitly marked in their…

Infants' language exposure largely involves face-to-face interactions providing acoustic and visual speech cues but also social cues that might foster language learning. Yet, both audiovisual speech information and social information have so far received little attention in research on infants' early language development. Using a preferential…

Previous research has shown that in different languages ironic speech is acoustically modulated compared to literal speech, and these modulations are assumed to aid the listener in the comprehension process by acting as cues that mark utterances as ironic. The present study was conducted to identify paraverbal features of German "ironic…

The development of native-like memory traces for foreign phonemes can be measured by using the Mismatch Negativity (MMN), a component of the auditory event-related potential. Previous studies have shown that the MMN is sensitive to changes in neural organization depending on language experience. Here we measured the MMN response in 5-6 year-old…

This dissertation investigates the media's portrayal of the linguistic situation of the predominantly Turkish migrant communities in Germany by analyzing data gathered from films, television clips, interviews, radio clips and the Internet, paying specific attention to the vowel systems of each speaker. I observe that the most salient aspect in…

In Dutch, vowel duration spelling is phonologically consistent but morphologically inconsistent (e.g., "paar--paren"). In German, it is phonologically inconsistent but morphologically consistent (e.g., "Paar--Paare"). Contrasting the two orthographies allowed us to examine the role of phonological and morphological consistency…