Papers by Heiner Drenhaus
Brain and Language, 2004
We describe an experiment that investigated the failure to license polarity items in German using... more We describe an experiment that investigated the failure to license polarity items in German using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The results reveal distinct processing reflexes associated with failure to license positive polarity items in comparison to failure to license negative polarity items. Failure to license both negative and positive polarity items elicited an N400 component reflecting semantic integration cost. Failure to license positive polarity items, however, also elicited a P600 component. The additional P600 in the positive polarity violations may reflect higher processing complexity associated with a negative operator. This difference between the two types of violation suggests that the processing of negative and positive polarity items does not involve identical mechanisms.
Page 1. Processing constraints on negative and positive polarity Shravan Vasishth, Sven Brüssow (... more Page 1. Processing constraints on negative and positive polarity Shravan Vasishth, Sven Brüssow (Potsdam); Richard L. Lewis (Michigan); Heiner Drenhaus, DouglasSaddy (Potsdam) CUNY 2006 New York, USA I. Introduction ...
A series of production and perception experiments investigating the prosody and well-formedness o... more A series of production and perception experiments investigating the prosody and well-formedness of special sentences, called Wide Focus Partial Fronting (WFPF), which consist of only one prosodic phrase and a unique initial accented argument, are reported on here. The results help us to decide between different models of German prosody. The absence of pitch height difference on the accent of
Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2013
ABSTRACT We tested the effects of two intonation contours on the processing and cued recall of Ge... more ABSTRACT We tested the effects of two intonation contours on the processing and cued recall of German sentences with a left-dislocated subject vs. object: (i) a rising accent on the dislocated phrase, followed by a rising-falling hat contour on the main clause; (ii) a falling accent on the dislocated phrase, followed by a falling accent plus subsequent deaccentuation. The contours had differential effects depending on the grammatical function of the dislocated phrase (subject/object) and, for the recall, on the cue type for the recall (subject/object), in certain conditions overriding the subject-before-object preference normally found in processing. To account for the findings, we propose: (1) Contour (i) signals the topic status of the referent of the dislocated phrase. Contour (ii) signals that referent's focus status. (2) Topics are referents that serve as an address in a structured discourse representation in working memory under which information about that referent is stored. (3) Subjects are default topics, whereas objects are not, so that topic-marking an object is motivated, which results in an object-before-subject preference for sentences with topical objects during processing. (4) Retrieval of information from an address incurs a lower processing load if the appropriate address is cued than if some other referent is cued.
Studies in Generative Grammar, 2005
Various lexical elements, such as the German negative polarity item jemals (ever) exhibit an inte... more Various lexical elements, such as the German negative polarity item jemals (ever) exhibit an interesting property in that they can only occur in certain kinds of contexts. Negative polarity items must occur in a context in which the proper semantic/pragmatic properties are accessible, ...
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Papers by Heiner Drenhaus