Ulrike Schild

University of Tuebingen | EKU Tübingen · Department of Psychology

Typically, people in cultures with a left-to-right reading direction mentally link past-related stimuli with the left space and future-related stimuli with the right space ("mental timeline”; MTL). Hence, enhanced reading experience might play a fundamental role in the development of the MTL. To test this, we implemented a child-friendly time-space...

In many situations of everyday life, it is important to quickly understand a spoken message despite distraction by an already ongoing activity. Previous dual-task studies recording the N400 component of the event-related potential (ERP) have shown that auditory language comprehension can be strongly delayed by temporally overlapping additional task...

Work with the looking-while-listening (LWL-) paradigm suggested that 6-month-old English-learning infants associated several labels for common nouns with pictures of their referents: While one distractor picture was present, infants systematically fixated the named target picture. However, recent work revealed constraints of infants' noun comprehen...

Phonemic awareness and rudimentary grapheme knowledge concurrently develop in pre-school age. In a training study, we tried to disentangle the role of both precursor functions of reading for spoken word recognition. Two groups of children exercised with phonemic materials, but only one of both groups learnt corresponding letters to trained phonemes...

It is widely accepted that finger and number representations are associated: many correlations (including longitudinal ones) between finger gnosis/counting and numerical/arithmetical abilities have been reported. However, such correlations do not necessarily imply causal influence of early finger-number training; even in longitudinal designs, media...

The mapping of phonetic information to lexical representations in adult and child speech was examined using cross-modal priming. Native adult listeners were presented with German word fragments (e.g., Para- from Parasit, ‘parasite’) that mismatched in the second vowel with a visual target word (e.g., Parodie, ‘parody’). Word fragments were spoken b...

The mapping of phonetic information to lexical representations in adult and child speech was examined using cross-modal priming. Native adult listeners were presented with German word fragments (e.g., Para-from Parasit, 'parasite') that mismatched in the second vowel with a visual target word (e.g., Parodie, 'parody'). Word fragments were spoken by...

Navigation crucially depends on the capability to estimate time elapsed and distance covered during movement. From adults it is known that magnitude estimation is subject to characteristic biases. Most intriguing is the regression effect (central tendency), whose strength depends on the stimulus distribution (i.e. stimulus range), a second characte...

Languages with contrastive stress, such as English or German, distinguish some words only via the stress status of their syllables, such as "CONtent" and "conTENT" (capitals indicate a stressed syllable). Listeners with a fixed-stress native language, such as Hungarian, have difficulties in explicitly discriminating variation of the stress position...

It is a matter of debate, whether and how improved auditory discrimination abilities enable speeded speech comprehension in congenitally blind adults. Previous research concentrated on semantic and syntactic aspects of processing. Here we investigated phonologically mediated spoken word access processes by means of word onset priming. Blind adults...

Although realization of the same speech sound is far from being consistent across different contexts, speech recognition has to rely on phonetic detail in order to detect words. So far, it appeared that young infants cannot avoid noticing subtle speech sound variation whenever it occurs. Only later on, they are able to tolerate speech sound variati...

Recent evidence suggests division of labor in phonological analysis underlying speech recognition. Adults and children appear to decompose the speech stream into phoneme-relevant information and into syllable stress. Here we investigate whether both speech processing streams develop from a common path in infancy, or whether there are two separate s...

Recent electrophysiological research on infant speech processing has shown that six-month-olds (i) seem to selectively focus on phoneme-relevant information of the signal by neglecting prosody-relevant information (Becker, Schild, Friedrich, 2014), and (ii) process phoneme-relevant information rather holistically than detailed (Teickner, Becker, S...

The directionality of space-number association (SNA) is shaped by cultural experiences. It usually follows the culturally dominant reading direction. Smaller numbers are generally associated with the starting side for reading (left side in Western cultures), while larger numbers are associated with the right endpoint side. However, SNAs consistent...

Recently we reported that spoken stressed and unstressed primes differently modulate Event Related Potentials (ERPs) of spoken initially stressed targets. ERP stress priming was independent of prime–target phoneme overlap. Here we test whether phoneme-free ERP stress priming involves the lexicon. We used German target words with the same onset phon...

Speech is characterized by phonemes and prosody. Neurocognitive evidence supports the separate processing of each type of information. Therefore, one might suggest individual development of both pathways. In this study, we examine literacy acquisition in middle childhood. Children become aware of the phonemes in speech at that time and refine phone...

Using word onset priming with early learned words, we tracked access to phonological representations and predictive phonological processing at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months after birth. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants heard German word onsets (primes) followed by disyllabic spoken words (targets). Primes and target onset...

Recent neurobiological studies revealed evidence for lexical representations that are not specified for the coronal place of articulation (PLACE; Friedrich, Eulitz, Friedrich, Lahiri, & Eulitz, 2008). Here we tested when these types of underspecified representations influence neuronal speech recognition. In a unimodal auditory?auditory word fragmen...

It has been demonstrated that written and spoken language processing are tightly linked. Here we focus on the development of this relationship at the time children start reading and writing. We hypothesize that the newly acquired knowledge about graphemes shapes lexical access in neural spoken word recognition. A group of preliterate children (six...

Spoken word onset syllables (prime fragments) have been used to track neurophysiological processing of following written words (targets). Between 300 and 400 ms event-related potentials (ERPs) over the left hemisphere were more positive for targets that did not match their preceding prime fragments (e.g., hun-dragon) compared to matching targets (e...