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The aim of the current study is to assess the impact of the wider discourse on pronoun interpretation. We specifically look at German demonstrative pronouns (dieser) in comparison to personal pronouns (er), investigating whether dieser-demonstratives are influenced only by factors in the preceding sentence (specifically, sentence topicality) or whether they are additionally influenced by cues from the wider discourse (i.e., discourse topicality). We found that discourse topicality competes with sentence topicality for prominence, when the two cues are not aligned to one and the same referent. This had an impact on referential interpretation of both personal and demonstrative pronouns, with weakened interpretive biases when sentence and discourse topic did not converge on the same referent (Exp. 3). Our data further indicate that the introduction of a protagonist from a well-known novel blocked the emergence of the discourse topic as a prominence-lending cue for personal pronouns (Exp. 1–2). We propose that reference to the famous protagonist triggers a protagonist layer, which introduces its own set of questions under discussion, which in turn invalidates the discourse topic. Crucially, the demonstrative pronoun dieser does not consider the protagonist layer and only relies on the discourse layer for interpretation.

This pupillometric study investigates the relevance of domain-final intonation for attention-orienting in German, employing a changing-state oddball paradigm with rising, falling and neutral intonation on deviant stimuli. Pupil dilation responses (PDR) to deviants were shown to be affected by their intonation contours, strengthening the case for the role of intonational edge tones in attention-orienting. Moreover, the magnitude and duration of the PDR response was higher for rises than falls, indicating the fundamental role of intonational rises for the activation of the attention-orienting mechanism in speech perception.

The study aims to determine if the positive ERP effect associated with self-relevance extends from first to second person pronouns and whether it is independent of the pronoun's referent. Two EEG experiments were conducted with 72 participants listening to two distinct audiobooks, "Tschick" and "Auferstehung der Toten" (AdT). The chosen novels differ in narrative structure, allowing for a comparison of the ERP response of 2sg pronouns that potentially refer to the listener with personal pronouns that do not. The narrative design of "Tschick" directed all 2nd person pronouns to characters in the story, while in "AdT" the listener was the most likely referent. The results reveal a significant positive ERP effect for second person pronouns in "AdT" compared to "Tschick," supporting the hypothesis that the self-relevance effect generalizes to second person pronouns. The findings suggest that this positivity in ERP reflects attentional processes enhancing the cortex's sensitivity to self-other distinctions.

The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs. adjectives) and were elicited via context sentences, which did not--unlike most previous ERP studies in the field--trigger an explicit focus expectation. Target utterances displayed prosodic realizations of the critical words which differed in accent position and accent type. Electrophysiological results showed an effect of information status, maximally distributed over posterior sites, displaying a biphasic N400-Late Positivity pattern for new information. We claim that this pattern reflects increased processing demands associated with new information, with the N400 indicating enhanced costs from linking information with the previous discourse and the Late Positivity indicating the listener's effort to update his/her discourse model. The prosodic manipulation registered more pronounced effects over anterior regions and revealed an enhanced negativity followed by a Late Positivity for deaccentuation, probably also reflecting costs from discourse linking and updating respectively. The data further lend indirect support for the idea that givenness applies not only to referents but also to non-referential expressions ("lexical givenness"). (Contains 4 tables, 5 figures and 8 notes.)

We present three event-related potential studies that investigated the contribution of givenness and position-induced topicality (what a sentence is about) to information processing. The studies compared two types of referential expressions (given and inferred noun phrases (NPs)) in distinct sentential positions. The data revealed position-specific effects, reflected by an interaction of topicality and givenness: inferred NPs registered a more pronounced Late Positivity than given NPs in the canonical sentence-medial position, but not sentence-initially (Experiment 1). Additionally, there was a stable effect of givenness across positions, reflected by an N400 for inferred over given NPs. From a discourse dynamic perspective, the N400 is considered to reflect context-induced linking processes. The Late Positivity is associated with maintaining and updating discourse structure and manifests position-specific instructions for information storage. Subsequent studies strengthened this information packaging account by showing that the Late Positivity pattern is unaffected by syntactic function reanalysis (Experiment 2) or dislocation demands (Experiment 3). (Contains 3 tables and 4 figures.)

The explicit marking of focus has a measurable impact on language comprehension, including the interpretation of pronouns, but so far the impact of focus on demonstrative pronouns has been largely overlooked. Using story-completion experiments with ditransitive contexts in German, we tested the role of focus in demonstrative pronoun resolution using the tools of the Bayesian model for pronouns, and furthermore investigated whether final position influences demonstrative pronoun interpretation independently of focus. We found that demonstrative pronouns are indeed influenced by focus to a similar extent as personal pronouns, but the influence for demonstratives is mediated via the next-mention bias. Final position also influences demonstrative pronouns, mediated not via the next-mention bias but the production likelihood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions [...]