Learning or Boredom? Task Adaptation Effects in Sentence Processing Experiments.

Task adaptation, characterized by a progressive increase in speed throughout experimental trials, has been extensively observed across various paradigms. Yet, the underlying mechanisms driving this phenomenon remain unclear. According to the learning-based explanation, participants are implicitly learning, becoming more proficient over time.

Number Agreement Attraction in Czech Comprehension: Negligible Facilitation Effects.

Number agreement attraction in comprehension has been extensively studied in various languages and it has been claimed that attraction effects are generally present across languages. In this paper, four experiments on Czech are presented, each examining a different structure. The Bayesian hierarchical models and Bayes factor analysis pointed towards no agreement attraction effects in three of the experiments.

Garden-path sentences and the diversity of their (mis)representations.

Previous studies have reliably shown that the initial misanalysis of garden-path sentences lingers even after the whole sentence is processed. However, other aspects of the resulting representation of these sentences are far from being clear. Some authors argue that comprehenders form a full analysis of the sentence which is faithful to the input and that the fact that the misanalysis lingers is due to an inhibition failure.

When and where did it happen? Systematic differences in recall of core and optional sentence information.

This article reports on four experiments aiming to examine immediate post-sentential recall of core sentence information (conveyed by direct objects), and optional/additional information (conveyed by temporal or locative adjuncts). Participants read simple and unambiguous Czech sentences such as : "An older retiree read the newspaper very carefully on Sunday in the library." Sentences always appeared as a whole after pressing a space bar.

The Multilingual Picture Database.

The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However, existing databases tend to be small in terms of the number of items they include, and have also been normed in a limited number of languages, despite the recent boom in multilingualism research.

When readers fail to form a coherent representation of garden-path sentences.

Various studies within the Good-Enough Approach observe that people often make errors in answering comprehension questions after reading garden-path sentences such as . Recently, it has been claimed that readers form a full syntactic analysis of these sentences, but they do not completely prune the original misanalysis. This article presents evidence that these findings do not hold for all garden-path sentences.

Long-term versus short-term consistency in the grapheme-colour synaesthesia: Grapheme-colour pairings can change in adulthood.

The aim of the article is to examine the stability of grapheme-colour matchings in adulthood. We carried out a panel study using computerized tests to measure short-term and long-term consistency. We conducted three testing rounds during 1 year and a half with a resulting sample of 26 synaesthetes.

The prevalence of synaesthesia depends on early language learning.

According to one theory, synaesthesia develops, or is preserved, because it helps children learn. If so, it should be more common among adults who faced greater childhood learning challenges. In the largest survey of synaesthesia to date, the incidence of synaesthesia was compared among native speakers of languages with transparent (easier) and opaque (more difficult) orthographies.