Garden-path processing in Czech
Investigators: Jan Chromý, Markéta Ceháková
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.
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.
Processing of temporal references at the sentence level
Investigators: Jan Chromý, Sonja Vojvodić
The project focuses on immediate recall of various pieces of information after reading an uncomplicated, unambiguous sentence. Specifically, we are interested in differences in recall between information conveyed through arguments (direct objects) and adjuncts (temporal and locative prepositional phrases). We also examine whether these differences are influenced by word order (information structure) and preceding context.
More information about the project (preregistrations, experimental items, AMLAP poster) 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.
Lexical retrieval in the bilinguals’ first language
Investigators: Marie Anna Hamanová, Jan Chromý
The project aims to analyze lexical retrieval in bilingual speakers with Czech as a first language. We plan to test speakers with differing levels of their L2 (from speaker with low proficiency in L2 to almost balanced bilinguals) and see whether the degree of proficiency in L2 correlates with the performance in the experimental tasks such as picture naming and verbal fluency. We will also test a specific group of translation studies (speakers with a very high knowledge of L2 with a deep training in switching between the languages).
Mental simulation of the illusory and the factual in negation processing
Investigators: Norbert Vanek, Ana Matić, Sara Košutar
Imagine a fish not jumping out of the water. How do comprehenders process negative statements? This study builds on the assumption that linguistic structure can facilitate or hinder negation processing and thereby affect mental simulations amongst speakers. We test this claim by manipulating the factual and the illusory in negation to directly explore native speakers’ mental simulations. We examine whether differences in sentential negation lead to differences in negation processing between languages (in this case Croatian and English), as well as between negation types within languages. For this purpose we designed an eye-tracking experiment, using a combination of pictures and audio recordings (N=42/group). We manipulated Negation type and Language, and measured anticipatory fixations (first fixations to indicate early mental simulation of factual vs. illusory & proportions of looks during auditory processing in the absence of pictures to indicate the strength of mental simulations) and integratory fixations (proportions of looks after reappearance of pictures).
More information about this study (including the materials and preregistration details) can be found here.
Picture naming norms for Czech
Investigators: Jan Chromý, Marie Anna Hamanová
In this project, we would like to create picture naming norms for 300 pictures for Czech. The pictures are selected from BOSS II database and they will be normed for various measures such as naming agreement, familiarity, lexical frequency etc. The norms will be made public for broad scientific audience.
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.
Multipic 2.0 project: Czech, Slovak and Hungarian
Invesitgators: Jan Chromý, Marie Anna Hamanová, Jiří Januška, Maroš Filip
Picture naming and familiarity norms for ca. 500 pictures for Czech (Jan Chromý, Marie Anna Hamanová), Slovak (Maroš Filip, and Hungarian (Jiří Januška) under the Multipic 2.0 project organized by Christos Pliatsikas (University of Reading) and Jon Andoni Duñabeitia (Universidad Nebrija).