10:00 - 11:00         

Peter Garrett (Cardiff University)

Changing Attitudes to Language - Evidence and Processes

This presentation looks at a number of studies conducted in recent years whose findings suggest possible changes in attitudes to language, including, though not solely, English. English is considered in relation to work in the UK that considers changing attitudes over the past 50 years, including discussion of standardness in contemporary British English, And it is also considered in relation to data from outside the UK on attitudes to Englishes, which might also suggest attitude change. The presentation considers attempts to explain such findings, both in terms of theoretical and methodological factors that might be influencing the results of such studies, and the processes that might be at work in generating attitudinal change, including the modern media. 

11:00 - 11:30

Coffee break

11:30 - 12:30

Adriana Hanulíková (University of Freiburg)

Speakers, listeners, and speech comprehension: a methodological perspective

This talk will provide an overview of methods to study how speakers' or listeners' characteristics affect speech perception and spoken-language comprehension.

12:30 - 14:00

Lunch break

14:00 - 15:00

Marion Krause (University of Hamburg)

Comprehensibility and intelligibility of foreignlanguage speech: the impact of error types and their frequency

The presentation will give an overview about different objects and methods of Perceptual linguistics. In linguistic research, terms like Perceptual dialectology als well as Perceptual sociolinguistics are well-known since the end of the XX century. As far, as they focus on linguistic signals of social meaning and their interpretation by naïve auditors they provide a fruitful methodological basis for studies on cross-linguistic influence, the perception of the results of CLI and the attitudes towards them. This perspective will be illustrated by a current study on perception and judgement of “ecological” spoken material (oral presentations) in an L2/L3 (Russian) by native speakers. The relevance of error types and their frequencies for speech comprehension and intelligibility will be discussed, as well as the status of grammatical deviations in relation to pragmatic factors.

10:00 - 10:40

Katja Roller (University of Freiburg, GRK 1624 ‘Frequency Effects in Language')

Perceptions of Welsh English Morphosyntactic Features: The Relation between Frequency and Salience

Recent research suggests that focus fronting ('A Welshman he was') is more frequent in spoken Welsh English than, for instance, the inverted word order in indirect questions ('She asked me was he a Welshman'). But do different frequencies also lead to different perceptions of grammatical features? The talk centres around the question in how far frequency and salience are connected with each other in dialect grammar. This involves the presentation of methods to determine how characteristic different grammatical features are of Welsh English and to find out if perceptions differ between 'insiders' (people from Wales) and 'outsiders' (people from England).

10:40 - 11:20

Evghenia Goltsev (University of Freiburg, GRK 1624 ‘Frequency Effects in Language')

Reactions to Different Types and Frequencies of Errors in Non-native German

Since one of the most essential functions of language is successful communication, it is very important to know by what means certain linguistic phenomena in the learner language influence it. The presentation will address the main aim of my study, namely to find out how native speakers of German perceive and judge erroneous utterances produced by advanced and intermediate learners of German with a Russian background. Thereby, the focus will be on such factors as intelligibility and acceptability as well as attitudes to speakers' personality traits. The essential research question of the study is: Does the frequency of modifications irrespective of type influence negative evaluation to a greater extent than particular deviation kinds like phonetic/phonological or morpho-syntactic errors do? According to this, the talk will contain previous corpus findings and methodological aspects of the study.

11:20 - 11:40

Coffee break

11:40 - 12:20

Anne Krause (University of Freiburg, GRK 1624 ‘Frequency Effects in Language')

How to Test the Perception of a Change-in-progress

Anne Krause's dissertation project investigates the frequency effects involved in a case of morphological change, i.e. change in the formation of the imperative of German strong verbs with vowel gradation (e.g. sprechen: sprich! > sprech(e)!).The distribution of this change-in-progress across verbs, registers, speakers etc. will be determined by means of a corpus study, hereby examining the influence of several measures of frequency and other potentially significant factors. One or several subsequent experiments are planned to test for speakers' awareness of and attitudes towards the change. The material presented in the workshop shall focus on the set-up of the experiment(s), paying particular attention to the test procedure to be chosen, possible priming effects, means of stimulus presentation, and questions of stimulus selection.

12:20 - 13:00

Olga Iljina (University of Freiburg, GRK 1624 ‘Frequency Effects in Language')

Towards investigating syntactic projections in natural speech production

This talk will be dedicatedto the role of the nucelar stress on investigations of the neural correlates of syntactic projection in electrophysiological recordings.