Slavic Languages in Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics explores the anchoring of language in cognition. The Slavic languages are an attractive topic for psycholinguistic studies since their structural characteristics offer great starting points for the development of research on speech processing. The research of these languages with experimental methods is, however, still in its infancy. This book provides an insight into the current research within this field. On one hand, central topic is the question of how Slavic languages can contribute to psycholinguistic findings. On the other hand, all chapters introduce their respective psycholinguistic method and discuss it according to its usefulness and transferability to the Slavic languages. The researched languages are mainly Russian and Czech, however, other languages (e.g., Polish, Belarusian or Bulgarian) are touched upon as well. Main topics are the characteristics of the mental lexicon, multilingualism, word recognition, and sentence comprehension. Furthermore, several contributions address the issue of verbal aspect and aktionsarten as well as other grammatical categories.

Prof. Dr. Tanja Anstatt ist Inhaberin des Lehrstuhls für slavistische Linguistik an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Dr. Anja Gattnar ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Sonderforschungsbereich 833: Bedeutungskonstitution - Dynamik und Adaptivität sprachlicher Strukturen an der Universität Tübingen. Dr. Christina Clasmeier ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Lehrstuhl für slavistische Linguistik der Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Introduction Barbara Mertins: The use of experimental methods in linguistic research: advantages, problems and possible pitfalls Roumyana Slabakova: How to investigate interpretation in Slavic experimentally? Dagmar Divjak, Antti Arppe & Harald Baayen: Does language-as-used fit a self-paced reading paradigm? (The answer may well depend on how you model the data.) Anja Gattnar: One experiment - different languages: A challenge for the transfer of experimental designs. Examples from cross-linguistic and inner-Slavic research 83 Anastasia Makarova: Variation in Russian verbal prefixes and psycholinguistic experiments Denisa Bordag: Reaction time methodology in psycholinguistic research: An overview of studies on Czech morphology Elena Dieser: Some "cases of doubt" in Russian grammar from different methodical perspectives Julija Nigmatulina, Olga Raeva, Elena Riechakajnen, Natalija Slepokurova & Anatolij Vencov: How to study spoken word recognition: evidence from Russian Christina Clasmeier, Tanja Anstatt, Jessica Ernst & Eva Belke: Are Schalter and sapka good competitors? Searching for stimuli for an investigation of the Russian-German bilingual mental lexicon Bernhard Brehmer, Tatjana Kurbangulova & Martin Winski: Measuring lexical proficiency in Slavic heritage languages: A comparison of different experimental approaches Jan Patrick Zeller, Gerd Hentschel & Esther Ruigendijk: Psycholinguistic aspects of Belarusian-Russian language contact. An ERP study on code-switching between closely related languages Jakub Jehlicka: Influence of spatial language on the non-linguistic spatial reasoning of sign language users. A comparison between Czech Sign Language users and Czech non-signers Index Notes on Contributors