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 sente…
How well can non-native length contrasts for vowels and for consonants be perceived and is one type more difficult than the other? Three listener groups (native Italian and German as well as advanced German learners of Italian) performed a speeded same–different task involving vocalic and consonantal length contrasts as well as segmental contrasts as controls. Phonologically, Italian, but…
Reading is a multileveled and interactive process in which readers construct a meaningful representation of text using their schemata. While it has been known for some time that both content and formal schemata are necessary for a complete understanding of written texts in a reader’s first language (L1), and has been suspected to be true in a reader’s second language (L2), it is still an ar…
One way in which specific crime fiction texts achieve prominence is through critical discourses which promote those texts’ ‘superior’ realism, valorizing the texts and setting them apart from neighbouring generic narratives. This article goes back to the 1921 analysis by Roman Jakobson which identifies a small number of strategies by which arguments about realism proceed. Particularly…