This paper details the methodology originally used for a cross-sector literature review of formative evaluation in Germany. The study involved an online keyword search using academic databases and Google Search to uncover documents containing and meaningfully discussing formative evaluation as well as alternative forms of this term in German that…

Conventional metaphors are a fundamental component of everyday communication, yet they are often overlooked in post-secondary German-language programs. This study examines the extent to which vocabulary breadth influences 19 L2 German learners' comprehension of conventional German metaphors, particularly those that exhibit cross-linguistic…

This study traced different types of distractor effects in the picture-word interference (PWI) task across repeated naming. Starting point was a PWI study by Kurtz et al. (2018). It reported that naming a picture (e.g., of a duck) was slowed down by a distractor word phonologically related to an alternative picture name from a different taxonomic…

German-speaking children between ages 2 and 3 mostly use the preposition ohne ('without') in an adult-like way, to express the absence of something. In this article we present surprising results from a corpus study suggesting that in this age group, absence can also be expressed using the sequence mit ohne 'with without'. We argue that this…

Earlier studies showed that bilinguals exhibit higher metacognitive efficiency than monolinguals. However, bilinguals do not represent a homogeneous population, and we don't know which aspects of bilingualism lead to metacognitive advantage. We studied if the language used as a medium of education might affect metacognition. Participants were…

Purpose: Many models of language comprehension assume that listeners predict the continuation of an incoming linguistic stimulus immediately after its onset, based on only partial linguistic and contextual information. Their related developmental models try to determine which cues (e.g., semantic or morphosyntactic) trigger such prediction, and to…

We used a novel linguistic training paradigm to investigate the experience-dependent acquisition, representation, and processing of novel emotional and neutral abstract concepts. Participants engaged in mental imagery (n = 32) or lexico-semantic rephrasing (n = 34) of linguistic material during five training sessions and successfully learned the…

We investigate German-Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system,…

To secure mutual understanding in interaction, speakers sometimes explain or negotiate expressions. Adopting a conversation analytic and interaction linguistic approach, I examine how participants explain which kinds of expressions in different sequential environments, using the format "x heißt y" ("x means y"). When speakers…

Purpose: Predictive language comprehension has become a major topic in psycholinguistic research. The study described in this article aims to investigate if German children with developmental language disorder (DLD) use grammatical gender agreement to predict the continuation of noun phrases in the same way as it has been observed for typically…

At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence "Jackie cut the bagel with a knife" encodes the categories Agent (i.e., "Jackie") and Patient (i.e., "the bagel"). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as "the…

Pronouns can sometimes covary with a non c-commanding quantifier phrase (QP). To obtain such 'telescoping' readings, a semantic representation must be computed in which the QP's semantic scope extends beyond its surface scope. Non-native speakers have been claimed to have more difficulty than native speakers deriving such non-isomorphic…

Item memory and source memory are different aspects of episodic remembering. To investigate metamemory differences between them, the authors assessed systematic differences between predictions of item memory via Judgments of Learning (JOLs) and source memory via Judgments of Source (JOSs). Schema-based expectations affect JOLs and JOSs…

Previous studies emphasized that there is a close connection between speech and thinking. The paper analyses the peripheral semantics of the German language's active vocabulary units to define how they represent the features of the national, linguistic picture of the world, namely, the mental traits of the German ethnos. Semantic methods and the…

To pinpoint difficulties in the second language (L2) processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences, this study investigates first language (L1) effects and effects of verb bias, i.e. frequency information about preferential verb complements, on semantic persistence effects in L2 sentence comprehension. We tested 32 L1 German and 32 L1 Turkish…