Garden-path processing in Czech
Investigators: Markéta Ceháková, Jan Chromý
The aim of the project is to analyze how do the native speakers of Czech process various Czech garden-path constructions. Specifically, we are interested in those cases when a speaker fails in forming a grammatically correct analysis of the construction. We are testing various types of garden-path constructions which differ in the difficulty of their diagnosis and repair. Our goal is thus to understand the nature of the incorrect processing of garden-path constructions. We are also interested in individual factors which influence the ability of doing a successful syntactic reanalysis. We employ self-paced reading, eye-tracking and acceptability judgments in this project.
More information about our experiments (together with preregistrations) may be found on OSF: Intraclausal garden-path project and coordination ambiguity project.
Immediate recall of information from written and spoken sentences
Investigators: Jan Chromý, Lucie Guštarová, Eva Pospíšilová, Ondřej Drobil
The project focuses on immediate recall of various pieces of information after reading an uncomplicated, unambiguous sentences. We are interested in the differences in recall between different types of information (adjectives, nouns, temporal and locative adjuncts) and in both linguistic and intrapersonal factors which influence recall rates, such as word order, information structure, preceding context, visual imagery, or inner speech.
Agreement attraction in Czech and English
Investigators: Jan Chromý, Radim Lacina, James Brand
The project aims to examine agreement attraction in Czech comprehension. Previous studies suggested that agreement attraction is a crosslinguistic phenomenon since attraction effects have been shown on typologically different languages such as English, Spanish, Russian, or Armenian. However, we hypothesize that there are no agreement attraction effects in Czech since Czech has very strong formal agreement and semantic agreement is almost never used.
More information about our experiments (together with preregistrations) may be found here.
Language attrition in Slovak speakers
Investigators: Adam Kříž, Jan Chromý
The project focuses on those native speakers of Slovak who live long-term in Prague, Czech Republic. We employ picture naming and lexical decision task to analyze on-going language attrition in these speakers. Findings of these tasks are related to various demographic factors such as length of stay in Prague, frequency of use of Czech and Slovak etc.
Iconicity of clause-order
Investigators: Michal Láznička, Jan Chromý
The project tests the hypothesis that iconic clause-order (i.e. order of clauses where the first clause describes an event which happened prior to the event of the second clause) should be processed easier and faster than non-iconic clause-order. We test this using self-paced reading in Czech.