Diplomacy of the Third Reich: Pre-war non-aggression pacts

Studium humanitní vzdělanosti - Historický modulLiberal Arts and Humanities - Historical ModuleFaculty of HumanitiesFakulta humanitních studi

Čtení vlastním tempem: kritické představení metody

Self-paced reading has been a widely used experimental method for study of the processing of sentences and texts. In this paper, we introduce the method to the Czech audience. We summarize its advantages and limitations and provide practical suggestions on stimuli construction and data processing. We also present different variants of the method, we discuss its ecological validity, and we summarize the experimental evidence showing that reaction times collected in self-paced reading can be linked to processing demands people might experience during reading. Finally, we present three examples of the application of the method: an experiment on agreement attraction in Czech, an experiment on garden-path sentences in Czech and an experiment studying the processing of short discourses in English. We also briefly discuss new trends that connect corpus linguistics with psycholinguistic discourse processing research and lead to the development of reading-time corpora

The online interpretation of sentence-internal same and distributivity

This paper investigates the processing of sentence-internal same with three licensors (each, all and the) in two orders: licensor+same (surface scope) and same+licensor (inverse scope). Our study shows that (i) there is no effect of surface vs. inverse scope, which we take as an argument for a model-oriented view of the processing cost of inverse scope, and (ii) all is processed faster than each and the with same, which we take as an argument for a particular semantics of distributive licensors

At least ignorance inferences come at a processing cost: Support from eye movements

We present results of an eye-tracking reading study that directly probes ignorance effects of the superlative numeral modifier at least in embedding and unembedding environments. We find that interpreting a numeral (phrase) modified by at least in a context with an ignorant speaker is costlier than in a context with a knowledgeable speaker, regardless of whether at least is in an embedding environment or not. In line with online studies testing scalar implicatures using a similar paradigm, this finding is taken to suggest that the observed processing cost is due to the derivation of ignorance interpretations via a pragmatic mechanism. Our results, given the paradigm we employ, further enable us to adjudicate not only between semantic and pragmatic accounts of ignorance, but also among various pragmatic proposals, favouring neo-Gricean accounts that derive ignorance as a quantity implicature (Büring 2008; Cummins & Katsos 2010; Schwarz 2013; Kennedy 2015). We find no evidence indicating that ignorance with at least in interaction with a universal modal involves an extra operation, like covert movement