Speaking Style Modulates Morphosyntactic Expectations in Young and Older Adults: Evidence from a Sentence Repetition Task

ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that talker identity and speaking style affect the processing of morphosyntactic violations. The present study examined whether speaking style modulates comprehension and subsequent production of case variants in German prepositional phrases across the life span. To this end, we conducted a sentence repetition and completion experiment with young and older adults. After a familiarization phase with two talkers (one with a careful pronunciation and one with a casual pronunciation), participants were asked to repeat utterances produced by these two talkers. Critical case markers were replaced by white noise. The results showed a main effect of speaking style in the responses of both age groups, suggesting that young and older adults can adjust their expectations about variants usage to the talker’s speaking style and can alter their subsequent production accordingly. These findings have implications for research on processing and producing morphosyntactic variation and expectation-based language processing.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the reviewers for the constructive feedback on a previous version of this article, and Ellison Luk for proofreading. We would also like to thank Carsten Eulitz for providing partial financial support.

Author contribution statement

AE and AH conceived of the idea for the study; AH designed the experiment and directed the study; AE prepared, performed, and analyzed the experiment; AH and AE wrote and revised the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Financial disclosure statement

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

1. Koch and Oesterreicher (2007) distinguish between the so-called conceptual speech and writing. This means that the medium and the structure of the respective genres are combined. As an example, news broadcasting corresponds to conceptual writing whereas the medium realization is oral. Similarly, a private chat corresponds to conceptual speech whereas the medium realization is written.

2. For a detailed overview of the variant use for während, see http://mediawiki.ids-mannheim.de/VarGra/index.php/Während_(Präposition), and for wegen, see http://mediawiki.ids-mannheim.de/VarGra/index.php/Wegen (cf. Dürscheid et al., 2019).