Niels O Schiller
Biographic Data
| ID | 5886842 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Niels O Schiller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Niels |
| FAMILY NAME | O Schiller |
| SIGNATURE | SCHILLER N O |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leiden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0392-7608 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Attentional dynamics in lexical and language identification: Evidence from eye-tracking
Concreteness Effects of Constituents in Naming Mandarin Compounds
The present study aims to use the concreteness effect to provide a detailed investigation of how Mandarin compounds are represented in the mental lexicon, that is, whether abstract and concrete morpheme constituents can influence the retrieval of Mandarin compounds during production. Our study investigated the question of the representation of Mandarin compound words through a picture naming task where forty-one participants were recruited. The b…
The effect of proficiency on phonological encoding in L2 speech production
During speech production, bilinguals need to encode target words phonologically before articulation, and the encoding units differ across languages. It remains an open question whether bilinguals employ the encoding unit in their L1 or L2 for phonological encoding. The present study examined the primary unit of phonological encoding in L2 speech production by Mandarin Chinese-English bilinguals with high and low L2 proficiency using the picture-w…
Processing syntactic violations in the non-native language: Different behavioural and neural correlates as a function of typological similarity
Despite often featuring in theoretical accounts, the exact impact of typological similarity on non-native language comprehension and its corresponding neural correlates remains unclear. We examined the modulatory role of typological similarity in syntactic violation processing in the non-native language Spanish, for example [el volcán] versus [*la volcán], and in cross-linguistic influence. Participants were Italian late learners of Spanish (simi…
Neuro-cognitive correlates of lexical borrowing during sentence comprehension of bi-dialectal speakers
This study explores lexical borrowing and loanword nativization from a neuro-cognitive perspective testing bi-dialectal speakers of Standard Chinese and Shanghainese Chinese. We created holistic and morpheme-based cross-dialectal loanwords for auditory sentence processing and compared them with Shanghainese-specific words, code-switches, and pre-existing etymologically related words. Participants rated their acceptance of each word, indicating Sh…
Variation in gender assignment strategies in mixed Spanish–Chinese noun phrases: Insights from a multilingual community in Barcelona
Aims and objectives: This study investigates gender assignment strategies in mixed Spanish–Chinese noun phrases (NPs) among early Spanish–Chinese bilinguals in Barcelona, Spain. It explores whether bilinguals rely on a default masculine or use the gender of Spanish translation equivalents across production and comprehension tasks. Design/methodology/approach: A multitask approach was employed, including a director-matcher task, a sentence repetit…
Recognizing two dialects in one written form: A Stroop study
This study aims to examine the influence of dialectal experience on logographic visual word recognition. Two groups of Chinese monolectals and three groups of Chinese bi-dialectals performed Stroop color-naming in Standard Chinese (SC), and two of the bi-dialectal groups also in their regional dialects. The participant groups differed in dialectal experiences. The ink-character relation was manipulated in semantics, segments, and tones separately…
Word and morpheme frequency effects in naming Mandarin Chinese compounds: More than a replication
We attempted to replicate the study by Janssen et al. (2008) that suggested a full-listing model for compound words. • We employed new stimuli from a spoken corpus and applied EEG to investigate the representation of Mandarin compounds. • Our behavioral results show that Mandarin compounds are sensitive to morpheme frequency. • Our findings challenge the full-listing model but support a decompositional view of compound representation. The questio…
When left is right: The role of typological similarity in multilinguals’ inhibitory control performance
Both inhibitory control and typological similarity between two languages feature frequently in current research on multilingual cognitive processing mechanisms. Yet, the modulatory effect of speaking two typologically highly similar languages on inhibitory control performance remains largely unexplored. However, this is a critical issue because it speaks directly to the organisation of the multilingual's cognitive architecture. In this study, we …
Orthography influences spoken word production in blocked cyclic naming
Cross-linguistic differences in gender congruency effects: Evidence from meta-analyses
It has been proposed that the order in which words are prepared for production depends on the speaker’s language. When producing the translation equivalent of the small cat, speakers of German or Dutch select the gender-marked determiner at a relatively early stage of production. Speakers of French or Italian postpone the encoding of a determiner or adjective until the phonological form of the noun is available. Hence, even though the words are p…
Context Matters for Tone and Intonation Processing in Mandarin
In tonal languages such as Mandarin, both lexical tone and sentence intonation are primarily signaled by F0. Their F0 encodings are sometimes in conflict and sometimes in congruency. The present study investigated how tone and intonation, with F0 encodings in conflict or in congruency, are processed and how semantic context may affect their processing. To this end, tone and intonation identification experiments were conducted in both semantically…
Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence regarding their representation and processing
In Chinese, when objects are named with their quantity, a numeral classifier must be inserted between the quantifier and the noun to produce a grammatically correct quantifier + classifier + noun phrase. In this study, we adopted the picture-word interference paradigm to examine participants' naming latencies for multiple objects and their electroencephalogram in four conditions by manipulating two factors, i.e. semantic relatedness and classifie…
Cross-linguistic interference in late language learners: An ERP study
This study investigated cross-linguistic interference in German low-proficient late learners of Spanish. We examined the modulating influence of gender congruency and cognate status using a syntactic violation paradigm. Behavioural results demonstrated that participants were more sensitive to similarities at the syntactic level (gender congruency) than to phonological and orthographic overlap (cognate status). Electrophysiological data showed tha…
The Oxford Handbook of Neurolinguistics
Evidence for syntactic feature transfer between two languages
In this commentary, I would like to support Goad and White’s (2019, henceforth G&W) claim that the morphosyntactic feature system in the L2 does not have to be defective due to certain syntactic features not being activated in the L1. I will base my point on the example of grammatical gender. Moreover, I would like to stress the importance of developing processing models for lexico-syntactic features in bilingual speakers. Processing models may b…
Adjective-noun order in Papiamento-Dutch code-switching
In Papiamento-Dutch bilingual speech, the nominal construction is a potential ‘conflict site’ if there is an adjective from one language and a noun from the other. Adjective position is pre-nominal in Dutch (cf. rode wijn ‘red wine’) but post-nominal in Papiamento (cf. biña kòrá ‘wine red’). We test predictions concerning the mechanisms underpinning word order in noun-adjective switches derived from three accounts: (i) the adjective determines wo…
Prosody perception and production by children with cochlear implants
The perception and production of emotional and linguistic (focus) prosody were compared in children with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) peers. Thirteen CI and thirteen hearing-age-matched school-aged NH children were tested, as baseline, on non-verbal emotion understanding, non-word repetition, and stimulus identification and naming. Main tests were verbal emotion discrimination, verbal focus position discrimination, acted emoti…
Do Persian Native Speakers Prosodically Mark Wh-in-situ Questions
It has been shown that prosody contributes to the contrast between declarativity and interrogativity, notably in interrogative utterances lacking lexico-syntactic features of interrogativity. Accordingly, it may be proposed that prosody plays a role in marking wh-in-situ questions in which the interrogativity feature (the wh-phrase) does not move to sentence-initial position, as, for example, in Persian. This paper examines whether prosody distin…
The Role of Prosody in the Identification of Persian Sentence Types: Declarative or Wh-question
It has been reported that prosody contributes to the identification of utterances which lack lexico-syntactic indicators of interrogativity but do have characteristic prosodic correlates (e.g. Vion and Colas 2006. Pitch cues for the recognition of yes-no questions in French. Journal of Psycholinguistics Research 35. 427–445). In Persian wh-in-situ questions, the interrogativity device (the wh-phrase) does not move to the sentence-initial position…
Catalise: A Multinational and Multidisciplinary Delphi Consensus Study. Identifying Language Impairments in Children
Delayed or impaired language development is a common developmental concern, yet there is little agreement about the criteria used to identify and classify language impairments in children. Children's language difficulties are at the interface between education, medicine and the allied professions, who may all adopt different approaches to conceptualising them. Our goal in this study was to use an online Delphi technique to see whether it was poss…
Constructing initial phonology in M andarin C hinese: Syllabic or subsyllabic? A masked priming investigation
Recent research has put forward the idea that C hinese speech production is governed by the syllable as the fundamental phonological unit. However, it may be that onset priming might be more difficult to obtain in M andarin C hinese. Therefore, in this study, the degree of overlap between prime and target was increased from C to CV (i.e., extending beyond the phoneme) as well as whether primes and targets had an overlapping structure ( CV vs. CVN…
Phonetics and Phonology in Language Comprehension and Production: Differences and Similarities
Bilingual language control: An event-related brain potential study
The Acquisition of Syllable Types
In this article, we present an account of developmental data regarding the acquisition of syllable types. The data come from a longitudinal corpus of phonetically transcribed speech of 12 children acquiring Dutch as their first language. A developmental order of acquisition of syllable types was deduced by aligning the syllabified data on a Guttman scale. This order could be analyzed as following from an initial ranking and subsequent rerankings …
The Syllabic Structure of Spoken Words: Evidence from the Syllabification of Intervocalic Consonants
A series of experiments was carried out to investigate the syllable affiliation of intervocalic consonants following short vowels, long vowels, and schwa in Dutch. Special interest was paid to words such as letter [l∊[UNKNOWN]t] “id.,” where a short vowel is followed by a single consonant. On phonological grounds one may predict that the first syllable should always be closed, but earlier psycholinguistic research had shown that speakers tend to …
Context Matters for Tone and Intonation Processing in Mandarin
In tonal languages such as Mandarin, both lexical tone and sentence intonation are primarily signaled by F0. Their F0 encodings are sometimes in conflict and sometimes in congruency. The present study investigated how tone and intonation, with F0 encodings in conflict or in congruency, are processed and how semantic context may affect their processing. To this end, tone and intonation identification experiments were conducted in both semantically…
Evaluation of a foreign speaker in forensic phonetics: A report
Expert witnesses in phonetics find themselves more and more often in forensic situations in which they have to identify the voice of a speaker who does not speak their native language. Until recently, little has been known about the role which the native language background of the listener plays in such speaker identification tasks. In this report, several aspects of an experimental investigation on the influence of native-language background on …
The effect of removing linguistic information upon identifying speakers of a foreign language
The native-language background of a listener has been shown to have an effect upon identifying speakers of a foreign language. Previous experimental research showed that a German target speaker was identified significantly better when listeners were native speakers of German, or native speakers of English who had some knowledge of German, than when they did not know the language of the target speaker (Schiller and Köster 1996). This result was ta…
Different influences of the native language of a listener on speaker recognition
In forensic phonetics, lay or expert witnesses might be confronted with voice samples for auditory evaluation from a language they do not understand. In speaker identification experiments, it has been shown that knowledge of the target language affects recognition results. Köster et al. (1995) showed that German listeners and English listeners with a knowledge of German identified a German voice better than English listeners without knowledge of …
The Syllabic Structure of Spoken Words: Evidence from the Syllabification of Intervocalic Consonants
A series of experiments was carried out to investigate the syllable affiliation of intervocalic consonants following short vowels, long vowels, and schwa in Dutch. Special interest was paid to words such as letter [l∊[UNKNOWN]t] “id.,” where a short vowel is followed by a single consonant. On phonological grounds one may predict that the first syllable should always be closed, but earlier psycholinguistic research had shown that speakers tend to …
The ability of expert witnesses to identify voices: A comparison between trained and untrained listerners
This study reports the results of a speaker identification experiment in which the performance of phonetic expert witnesses and untrained listeners was compared. In a direct identification task participants from both groups were asked to identify the voice of a target speaker among five foils. Results showed that expert witnesses, who were experienced in speaker identification, performed significantly better than untrained listeners, who had no e…
The correlation between auditory speech sensitivity and speaker recognition ability
In various applications of forensic phonetics the question arises as to how far aural-perceptual speaker recognition performance is reliable. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the relationship between speaker recognition results and human perception/production abilities like musicality or speech sensitivity. In this study, performance in a speaker recognition experiment and a speech sensitivity test are correlated. The results show a moderate…
The Acquisition of Syllable Types
In this article, we present an account of developmental data regarding the acquisition of syllable types. The data come from a longitudinal corpus of phonetically transcribed speech of 12 children acquiring Dutch as their first language. A developmental order of acquisition of syllable types was deduced by aligning the syllabified data on a Guttman scale. This order could be analyzed as following from an initial ranking and subsequent rerankings …
Bilingual language control: An event-related brain potential study
Phonetics and Phonology in Language Comprehension and Production: Differences and Similarities
Constructing initial phonology in M andarin C hinese: Syllabic or subsyllabic? A masked priming investigation
Recent research has put forward the idea that C hinese speech production is governed by the syllable as the fundamental phonological unit. However, it may be that onset priming might be more difficult to obtain in M andarin C hinese. Therefore, in this study, the degree of overlap between prime and target was increased from C to CV (i.e., extending beyond the phoneme) as well as whether primes and targets had an overlapping structure ( CV vs. CVN…
Catalise: A Multinational and Multidisciplinary Delphi Consensus Study. Identifying Language Impairments in Children
Delayed or impaired language development is a common developmental concern, yet there is little agreement about the criteria used to identify and classify language impairments in children. Children's language difficulties are at the interface between education, medicine and the allied professions, who may all adopt different approaches to conceptualising them. Our goal in this study was to use an online Delphi technique to see whether it was poss…
The Role of Prosody in the Identification of Persian Sentence Types: Declarative or Wh-question
It has been reported that prosody contributes to the identification of utterances which lack lexico-syntactic indicators of interrogativity but do have characteristic prosodic correlates (e.g. Vion and Colas 2006. Pitch cues for the recognition of yes-no questions in French. Journal of Psycholinguistics Research 35. 427–445). In Persian wh-in-situ questions, the interrogativity device (the wh-phrase) does not move to the sentence-initial position…
The Oxford Handbook of Neurolinguistics
Evidence for syntactic feature transfer between two languages
In this commentary, I would like to support Goad and White’s (2019, henceforth G&W) claim that the morphosyntactic feature system in the L2 does not have to be defective due to certain syntactic features not being activated in the L1. I will base my point on the example of grammatical gender. Moreover, I would like to stress the importance of developing processing models for lexico-syntactic features in bilingual speakers. Processing models may b…
Adjective-noun order in Papiamento-Dutch code-switching
In Papiamento-Dutch bilingual speech, the nominal construction is a potential ‘conflict site’ if there is an adjective from one language and a noun from the other. Adjective position is pre-nominal in Dutch (cf. rode wijn ‘red wine’) but post-nominal in Papiamento (cf. biña kòrá ‘wine red’). We test predictions concerning the mechanisms underpinning word order in noun-adjective switches derived from three accounts: (i) the adjective determines wo…
Prosody perception and production by children with cochlear implants
The perception and production of emotional and linguistic (focus) prosody were compared in children with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) peers. Thirteen CI and thirteen hearing-age-matched school-aged NH children were tested, as baseline, on non-verbal emotion understanding, non-word repetition, and stimulus identification and naming. Main tests were verbal emotion discrimination, verbal focus position discrimination, acted emoti…
Do Persian Native Speakers Prosodically Mark Wh-in-situ Questions
It has been shown that prosody contributes to the contrast between declarativity and interrogativity, notably in interrogative utterances lacking lexico-syntactic features of interrogativity. Accordingly, it may be proposed that prosody plays a role in marking wh-in-situ questions in which the interrogativity feature (the wh-phrase) does not move to sentence-initial position, as, for example, in Persian. This paper examines whether prosody distin…
Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence regarding their representation and processing
In Chinese, when objects are named with their quantity, a numeral classifier must be inserted between the quantifier and the noun to produce a grammatically correct quantifier + classifier + noun phrase. In this study, we adopted the picture-word interference paradigm to examine participants' naming latencies for multiple objects and their electroencephalogram in four conditions by manipulating two factors, i.e. semantic relatedness and classifie…
Cross-linguistic interference in late language learners: An ERP study
This study investigated cross-linguistic interference in German low-proficient late learners of Spanish. We examined the modulating influence of gender congruency and cognate status using a syntactic violation paradigm. Behavioural results demonstrated that participants were more sensitive to similarities at the syntactic level (gender congruency) than to phonological and orthographic overlap (cognate status). Electrophysiological data showed tha…
Context Matters for Tone and Intonation Processing in Mandarin
In tonal languages such as Mandarin, both lexical tone and sentence intonation are primarily signaled by F0. Their F0 encodings are sometimes in conflict and sometimes in congruency. The present study investigated how tone and intonation, with F0 encodings in conflict or in congruency, are processed and how semantic context may affect their processing. To this end, tone and intonation identification experiments were conducted in both semantically…
When left is right: The role of typological similarity in multilinguals’ inhibitory control performance
Both inhibitory control and typological similarity between two languages feature frequently in current research on multilingual cognitive processing mechanisms. Yet, the modulatory effect of speaking two typologically highly similar languages on inhibitory control performance remains largely unexplored. However, this is a critical issue because it speaks directly to the organisation of the multilingual's cognitive architecture. In this study, we …
Orthography influences spoken word production in blocked cyclic naming
Cross-linguistic differences in gender congruency effects: Evidence from meta-analyses
It has been proposed that the order in which words are prepared for production depends on the speaker’s language. When producing the translation equivalent of the small cat, speakers of German or Dutch select the gender-marked determiner at a relatively early stage of production. Speakers of French or Italian postpone the encoding of a determiner or adjective until the phonological form of the noun is available. Hence, even though the words are p…
Recognizing two dialects in one written form: A Stroop study
This study aims to examine the influence of dialectal experience on logographic visual word recognition. Two groups of Chinese monolectals and three groups of Chinese bi-dialectals performed Stroop color-naming in Standard Chinese (SC), and two of the bi-dialectal groups also in their regional dialects. The participant groups differed in dialectal experiences. The ink-character relation was manipulated in semantics, segments, and tones separately…
Word and morpheme frequency effects in naming Mandarin Chinese compounds: More than a replication
We attempted to replicate the study by Janssen et al. (2008) that suggested a full-listing model for compound words. • We employed new stimuli from a spoken corpus and applied EEG to investigate the representation of Mandarin compounds. • Our behavioral results show that Mandarin compounds are sensitive to morpheme frequency. • Our findings challenge the full-listing model but support a decompositional view of compound representation. The questio…
Linguistics (26 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (18 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (12 works) · Cognition (10 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (9 works) · Cognitive psychology (8 works) · Artificial Intelligence (7 works) · Natural language processing (7 works)