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 Starší důchodce velmi pečlivě pročetl noviny v neděli v knihovně: "An older retiree read the newspaper very carefully on Sunday in the library." Sentences always appeared as a whole after pressing a space bar. Immediately after the sentence disappeared, an open-ended (free response) question was presented targeting either the direct object (e.g., newspaper), temporal adjunct (e.g., on Sunday), or locative adjunct (e.g., in the library). Altogether, it was found that the core information (conveyed by the direct object) was recalled almost perfectly, whereas additional information, conveyed by temporal and locative adjuncts, was recalled with significantly lower accuracy rates. Information structure also played a role: if the temporal or locative adjunct was focused, it was recalled better than if it was unfocused. The present article thus shows systematic differences in recall success for different pieces of information. These findings suggest the presence of selective attention mechanisms during early stages of sentence processing. Factors such as syntactic function or information structure influence the degree of attention to different pieces of information conveyed by a sentence. In turn, certain pieces of information may not be consciously accessible already after the sentence is processed.

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. Only in one experiment an effect interpretable as signaling agreement attraction was observed. Its size, however, was so small that it did not translate into a clear preference for models with agreement attraction. The data from the four experiments were further compared to available data from several other languages (English, Armenian, Arabic, and Spanish). The emerging picture is that in Czech, agreement attraction effects are negligible in size if they appear at all. This presents a serious challenge to current theoretical explanations of agreement attraction effects.

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. Recently, it has been shown that comprehenders might not manage to create a coherent representation at all, at least in the case of more demanding garden-path structures. The aim of the current paper is to examine resulting representations of garden-path sentences in more detail. To do this, four self-paced reading experiments in Czech were conducted, which differed in the presentation mode (word-by-word and sentence-at-once) and comprehension question format (yes-no questions and open-ended questions). The experiments replicated effects typical for the lingering initial misanalysis, but provided mixed evidence for other aspects of resulting representations. In most cases, participants managed to build a coherent representation that was faithful to the input. However, both the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results showed that comprehenders sometimes maintained multiple local interpretations at once or even failed to build a coherent representation of a garden-path sentence. Thus, we argue that resulting representations of garden-path sentences are in fact not uniform, but rather diverse, and they vary both in their faithfulness to the presented input and in their internal coherence.

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 While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib. 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. The main finding of the Good-Enough Approach-that the comprehension questions targeting the initial misanalysis yield significantly higher rates of incorrect answers after garden-path sentences, in comparison with after control sentences-was replicated here in three self-paced reading experiments on Czech. However, these experiments show a similar pattern of results for other comprehension questions, such as questions targeting an analysis that is not syntactically licensed at any point of processing. These results point out that certain garden-path structures may be very hard to process and that the process of garden-path repair might not be successful at all. Based on these results and the results of previous studies, the idea of a range of difficulty levels for garden-path structures is proposed.

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. Contrary to our prediction, native speakers of Czech (transparent) were more likely to be synaesthetes than native speakers of English (opaque). However, exploratory analyses suggested that this was because more Czechs learned non-native second languages, which was strongly associated with synaesthesia, consistent with the learning hypothesis. Furthermore, the incidence of synaesthesia among speakers of opaque languages was double that among speakers of transparent languages other than Czech, also consistent with the learning hypothesis. These findings contribute to an emerging understanding of synaesthetic development as a complex and lengthy process with multiple causal influences.