Angelina Ioannidou-Tsiomou
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik
Hello everyone! I am more than delighted to be one of the 2023 Fellows of the CRC. So let me introduce myself. My name is Angelina and I was born in Thessaloniki, a beautiful Greek port-city, where I graduated in German Studies with focus on Linguistics at the Aristoteles University. During my Linguistics Master Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin I had the luck to get introduced to the amazing world of psycholinguistics and to start my master thesis within the CRC SFB1412 C03 project, investigating the influence of register formality and verb constraints on spoken language comprehension.
With music being one of my greatest passions and an important part of my upbringing and of the person I have become, my interest very soon shifted to investigating the way individuals perceive linguistic and musical cues, both rhythmic as well as melodic, and how music perception influences language perception and development and vice versa. In the framework of this fellowship, to be supervised by Prof. Dr. Pia Knoeferle and Dr. Katja Maquate, I plan to examine music as a communication trope in the role of social context, using eye-tracking, with some of the main questions being: Can music function as formality-register context? Can music convey socially situated information as well as, better or worse than pictures? Is there a correlation between the communication tropes of music and pictures as social context? I hope the major and the minor will give me key-answers.
Projects
MGK
Integrated Graduate School
C03
Real-time register comprehension in adolescent heritage speakers’ languages
Contact
Unter den Linden 6 , 10099 Berlin
Publications & Presentations
Maquate, Katja; Patarroyo, Angela Giovanna; Ioannidou-Tsiomou, Angelina; Knoeferle, Pia (2024) Age differences in spoken language comprehension: verb-argument and formality-register congruence influence real-time sentence processing In: Discourse Processes [ViVo] Using the Visual World Paradigm, we investigated participants’ processing of formality register and verb-argument (in)congruent sentences. Crucially, we tested whether individual differences influence sentence processing by taking participants’ age (18–45 years) and their social status (high vs. low) into account. Participants listened to German context sentences that set up formal (e.g. Elegantly dressed says Peter:) or informal (e.g. Sloppily dressed rambles Peter:) situations while they looked at images that were associated either with a formal (e.g. a pair of fancy shoes and chic clothes) or informal (e.g. a pair of old shoes and casual clothes) context. Following the context sentence, they listened to a German target sentence (e.g. I’m soon tying my shoescolloquial). The verb in the target sentence imposed semantic constraints on its arguments (e.g. tie has a good semantic fit with shoes but fits less well with clothes). The on-screen images represented candidate post-verbal referents (e.g. shoes or clothes), creating semantic congruence between the verb constraints and two out of four candidate referents. This verb-argument congruence factor was crossed with congruence between the formality of the context sentence and the (informal vs. more formal) register of the post-verbal argument (e.g. shoesstandard vs. shoescolloquial). Our results show that participants take the formality of the context into account to inform anticipation of matching images on the screen. Moreover, the older the participants were, the more they took the formality of the context into account. All participants made use of the verb’s restrictions: They anticipated and integrated the named object noun argument. Crucially, only younger but not middle-aged participants made use of the context sentence formality to further inform expectations of verb-argument congruence. Participants’ social status did not influence register and verb-argument sentence processing.