ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that talker identity and speaking style affect the processing of morphosyntactic violations. The present study examined whether speaking style modulates comprehension and subsequent production of case variants in German prepositional phrases across the life span. To this end, we conducted a sentence repetition and completion experiment with young and older adults. After a familiarization phase with two talkers (one with a careful pronunciation and one with a casual pronunciation), participants were asked to repeat utterances produced by these two talkers. Critical case markers were replaced by white noise. The results showed a main effect of speaking style in the responses of both age groups, suggesting that young and older adults can adjust their expectations about variants usage to the talker’s speaking style and can alter their subsequent production accordingly. These findings have implications for research on processing and producing morphosyntactic variation and expectation-based language processing.

摘要

先前的研究表明，说话者的身份和说话方式会影响语态句法违规的处理。本研究检查了口语风格是否调节了在整个生命周期中德语介词短语中对格变体的理解和随后的产生。为此，我们对年轻人和老年人进行了重复句子和完成句子的实验。在与两个说话者熟悉一个阶段（一个说话者的发音很认真，另一个说话者的发音很随意）之后，要求参与者重复这两个说话者的发音。关键案例标记已被白噪声取代。结果表明，口语风格在两个年龄段的人均反应中均起主要作用，建议年轻人和老年人可以根据说话者的说话风格调整他们对变体用法的期望，并相应地改变其后续制作。这些发现对加工和产生句法变位以及基于期望的语言加工的研究具有启示意义。