28.2243, Review: Belarusian; Bulgarian; Czech; Polish; Russian; Slavic Subgroup; Cog Sci; Ling Theories; Psycholing: Anstatt, Gattnar, Clasmeier (2016)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-2243. Wed May 17 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.2243, Review: Belarusian; Bulgarian; Czech; Polish; Russian; Slavic Subgroup; Cog Sci; Ling Theories; Psycholing: Anstatt, Gattnar, Clasmeier (2016)

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Date: Wed, 17 May 2017 15:49:49
From: Iya Price [iya.khelm at mavs.uta.edu]
Subject: Slavic Languages in Psycholinguistics

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-2587.html

EDITOR: Tanja  Anstatt
EDITOR: Anja  Gattnar
EDITOR: Christina  Clasmeier
TITLE: Slavic Languages in Psycholinguistics
SUBTITLE: Chances and Challenges for Empirical and Experimental Research
SERIES TITLE: Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik (TBL) 554
PUBLISHER: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Iya Khelm Price, University of Texas at Arlington

Reviewer: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The book “Slavic Languages in Psycholinguistics. Chances and Challenges for
Empirical and Experimental Research” edited by Tanja Anstatt, Anja Gattnar,
Christina Clasmeier  is a collection of twelve papers that discuss the use of
psycholinguistic methodology for investigation of Slavic languages. The
collection is the result of the workshop on Slavic language processing that
the authors of the articles attended in 2014 at the University of Tubingen.
The workshop discussed methodological challenges related to investigating
Slavic languages using psycholinguistic methodology, which became the central
theme of this volume. This book will be mainly of interest to the researchers
that work or are planning to work with Slavic languages; however, it covers a
broad variety of topics, so the researchers might find it more useful to look
at individual papers from the collection that are more closely related to
their area of interest. The book might be also used as a supplemental material
in a special seminar or a course on Slavic languages in psycholinguistics. 

The papers in this volume report on different issues that the researchers
encountered when investigating Slavic language processing. The problems that
relate to item selection and creation, participants’ variability in
acceptability judgements, analysis techniques, and choices of methodology are
covered in the collection. Importantly, most papers propose possible solutions
or suggestions to how to address these issues. While all papers discuss the
difficulties based on Slavic languages, most of these problems are not
language-specific and are common for psycholinguistic research in general. The
first paper is an overview of psycholinguistic research methods and might
serve as an introduction for those who are not familiar with the field.
Various topics are represented in the book: two papers talk about
morphological processing and morphological variation, two are on variability
in acceptability judgements, two are on bilingual mental lexicon, one is on
code-switching, one paper is on analysis of processing of naturalistic corpus
data, one paper is on cross-linguistic comparisons, and, finally, one paper is
related to sign language. A variety of methods are covered in the collection:
self-paced reading, eye tracking, corpus analysis, event-related potential
(ERP), variety of acceptability judgement tasks, lexical decision tasks, etc.
Most papers in the book are related to the Russian language, three to Czech,
one to Polish, and one to Belarusian.
 
The first paper, “The use of experimental methods in linguistic research:
advantages, problems and possible pitfalls” by Barbara Mertins is an overview
of pros and cons of different methods used in psycholinguistic research:
offline, behavioral, and neurological online methods. The paper focuses and
provides detailed descriptions of the experimental methods used in the
author’s own research, such as elicitations, eye tracking, memory tasks, and
preference judgements. The methodology and procedures of the conducted studies
are detailed, and some downsides that were discovered while conducting these
studies are pointed out, as well as considerations for future researchers
planning to use similar tasks and techniques. Finally, the author talks about
advantages of using quantitative research methods over qualitative.

The second paper, “How to investigate interpretation in Slavic
experimentally?” by Roumyana Slabakova discusses variability in interpretation
judgments by native speakers of Russian. Two cases are compared, one of which
details unexpected interpretations when investigating mass nouns and bare
plurals as objects in the constructions with perfective and imperfective
verbs, and the other study investigates acceptability of topic vs. focus
objects in preverbal/fronted positions. The author shows that the expectations
for the judgements set by the linguistic theory are not always borne out by
native speaker participants, whose judgments are not as categorical as the
theory would predict. To explain this phenomenon, the author proposes a
grammar that points out that in Slavic languages, particularly in Russian,
grammatical meanings are underspecified and largely dependent on context,
lexical material, word order, intonation, and other factors. Thus, the author
suggests that methods like elicitations, ERP, or eye tracking might not be
suitable for studying flexible meanings in Slavic languages related to aspect,
definiteness, information structure, etc.

The third paper, “Does language-as-used fit a self-paced reading paradigm?
(The answer may well depend on how you model the data.)” by Dagmar Divjak,
Antti Arppe, and Harald Baayen shows how Generalized Linear Mixed effects
Regression Model can be used to analyze data of self-paced reading experiments
that use naturalistic data, that is, when the experimental sentences are not
artificially created and balanced for the experiment, but produced by Russian
native speakers and found in a corpus. Such naturalistic sentences did not
have comparable word orders and thus the regions of interest were at different
positions in the experimental items. The study first shows the patterns found
in the corpus, and then how they correspond to the subjects’ processing
patterns of these sentences. While the authors appear to conclude with more
questions than answers, they bring up important points of how the
morphologically-rich Russian language, with flexible word order that creates
shades and nuances in meaning, cannot be fit into the pre-constructed
fixed-word order items.

The paper “One experiment – different languages: A challenge for the transfer
of experimental designs. Examples from cross-linguistic and inner-Slavic
research” by Anja Gattnar raises important issues related to comparing
linguistic phenomena across languages using time-sensitive experimental
methods. The differences in verbal aspect marking in Russian and Czech are
discussed and then their processing compared experimentally using self-paced
reading and forced choice experiments. In addition, the processing of
overtly-marked aspect in Russian is compared to processing of revealed through
context aspect in German using eye tracking. The paper points out that when
constructing items, the issues related to word order, absent categories,
alignment of syllables, and differences in frequencies can complicate
conducting the same experiment in a different language. The author provides
detailed descriptions of how it was possible to adjust the items to be able to
do that, and suggests that cross-linguistic experimental designs should be
planned in advance, items for both languages should be created simultaneously,
and less time-sensitive measures should be used.  

The next paper, “Variation in Russian verbal prefixes and psycholinguistic
experiments”, by Anastasia Makarova investigates Russian morphological
variation in two cloze-test experiments based on the corpus data. The results
of the investigation showed that native speakers do not randomly choose the
morphemes to express closely related meanings, but the choice is motivated by
frequency, morphology, semantics, and context. The native speakers’
preferences found experimentally corresponded to pattern of results revealed
in the corpus. Furthermore, the author discusses methodological challenges
that arose with the change of the types of morphemes under investigation.
Importantly, the author discusses solutions that were implemented in the
experimental design as well as in the analysis. Overall, the paper emphasizes
importance of adjusting the design and analysis for different types of
seemingly similar, but different when taking a closer look, morphological
phenomena. Finally, the author shows how corpus data can provide basis for
experimental investigations. 

Denisa Bordag’s paper “Reaction time methodology in psycholinguistic research:
An overview of studies on Czech morphology” is a summary of studies that
investigate morphological processing in the highly inflectional Czech
language. This paper discusses several techniques that measure reaction times,
such as lexical decision task, morphological repetition priming, and
picture-word distractor paradigm. These techniques aim to investigate how
inflected verbs are represented in mind and to test morphological
decomposition of words with inflectional and derivational morphemes. The
article also discusses how properties of the Czech language (grammatical
gender, declensional and conjugational classes) can be used to investigate
mental representations and processing mechanisms. 

Elena Dieser’s paper “Some “cases of doubt” in Russian grammar from different
methodological perspectives” investigates acceptability by Russian native
speakers of different grammatical variations in Russian. Several types of
grammaticality and acceptability judgement tasks were used in this
investigation. Some of these tasks had a scale (1-5) on which the participants
rated the items, while others used a rating scale with no endpoints. Moreover,
some of these ratings were followed by additional questions, and others were
not.. While the results of different methods did not differ statistically, the
author shows that there is no strict judgement on acceptability of grammatical
variations across participants, and various methods complement each other to
help explain the reasons why certain items received a specific rating.
Overall, the paper demonstrates comparison of different methods and how they
work together to reveal additional information about the choices the
participants make. 

The next paper, “How to study spoken word recognition: evidence from Russian”
by Julija Nigmatulina, Olga Raeva, Elena Riechakajnen, Natalija Slepokurova,
and Anatolij Vencov is an overview of the spoken word recognition research and
a proposal of several methodological principles that the researchers should
follow when investigating how people understand speech. The authors talk about
importance of using spontaneous speech as the experimental stimuli to
investigate speech recognition mechanisms. Specifically, they point out the
necessity of creating and using spontaneous speech corpora and issues
associated with it, such as the issue of transcribing the speech properly and
the number of sound variations. In Russian, there is much variation in terms
of vowel reductions, as well as pauses. The paper discusses the use of
different methodologies, such as dictation, cloze test tasks, creating a
context for a word, rating the naturalness of context, and others. The authors
conclude with remarks that future researchers of spoken speech recognition
should consider. 

The following paper, “Are Schalter and sapka good competitors? Searching for
stimuli for an investigation of the Russian-German bilingual mental lexicon”
by Christina Clasmeier, Tanja Anstatt, Jessica Ernst, and Eva Belke, is about
difficulties that arise when creating stimuli for experimental research. The
authors mention that the process of item creation is rarely described in the
literature in enough detail to understand the number of difficulties that it
involves. Thus, they provide a detailed description of creating items for an
eye-tracking study with visual word paradigm, which was designed to
investigate the co-activation phenomena in L1 and L2 with early and late
bilinguals. The methodological problems that the paper describes are related
to word frequency disparities, finding the straightforward word and picture
matches, and evaluation of phonetic and phonological differences between the
languages under investigation. The authors describe pre-tests they conducted
to ensure that the words and pictures used in the experiments clearly match.
They suggest that the solution for the frequency disparities between the items
could be including the item frequency as a factor in the statistical analysis
of results or using a subjective frequency test instead the corpus frequency
analysis. Finally, the authors emphasize the importance of quantitative
analysis when analyzing the amount of phonological overlap between the items. 

The paper “Measuring lexical proficiency in Slavic heritage languages: A
comparison of different experimental approaches” by Bernhard Brehmer, Tatjana
Kurbangulova, and Martin Winski presents how different experimental methods
evaluate the lexical abilities of young bilinguals, specifically, Russian and
Polish heritage speakers in Germany. The methods used for the investigation
were a picture naming task, a semantic mapping task, translation tasks, and
verbal fluency tasks. While the authors found that the results of all tasks
statistically correlated, the translation task was found to be the most
strongly correlated with the results of other tasks, so it was concluded to be
the best for evaluation of bilinguals’ lexical proficiency. However, the
authors demonstrated that using multiple tasks and not just a single method
was beneficial to reveal the different dimensions of lexical knowledge; and
thus they concluded that for the best set of results, several methods should
be used in combination. 

In Jan Partick Zeller, Gerd Hentschel, and Esther Ruigendijk’s paper
“Psycholinguistic aspects of Belarusian-Russian language contact. An ERP study
on code-switching between closely related languages”, the authors discuss
issues related to language contact, code-switching, and code-mixing. They
raise the issue of uniqueness of bilingualism with such closely related
languages as Belarusian and Russian, to which the authors refer as
“mixed-monolingualism”. The ERP methodology was used in this study to
investigate processing of Belarusian-Russian and Russian-Belarusian
code-switching. It was found that while there appeared to be sensitivity to
the switching that is normally associated with lexical retrieval, there was no
indication of syntactic reanalysis, which was explained in terms of the
structural properties of the two languages being closely related.  

The final paper, “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” by Jakub Jehlicka aims to investigate the
correlation between the participants’ spatial reasoning abilities and their
gender, sign-language competence, and types of objects presented to them, as
well as the objects’ rotation and arrangement. The study predicts that
non-hearing signers should be more competent in the spatial reasoning than
hearing non-signers. The interim results are presented in the paper since the
study was still ongoing at the time of publication.

EVALUATION

The papers in this book are mainly related to issues the researchers
encountered when creating and conducting experiments investigating processing
of Slavic languages. This collection constitutes a valuable discussion of
potential issues that researchers need to consider before designing the
experiments and starting data collection. There are not many volumes dedicated
to this aspect of psycholinguistic research and specifically related to Slavic
language processing. The volume demonstrates that Slavic languages in
psycholinguistics need a special approach and brings up issues that do not
arise when studying other language groups. All papers discuss issues related
to adjusting experimental design to the specific phenomenon and data under
investigation. While psycholinguists generally know that one design does not
fit different data sets or different goals of the experiments, it has not been
discussed in detail in relation to linguistic issues in Slavic languages. The
papers in the book clearly demonstrate the number of variables that the
researchers need to account for when creating the experimental items. Most of
the issues discussed in the book could be generalized to study of language
processing in general. 

One of the shortcomings of the book is that while Slavic languages is a
unifying topic running through the collection, the variety of topics and
methods, and the differences in complexity of studies make it difficult to
identify the appropriate audience for it. Some papers go into much depth and
statistical detail, while others explain details that are too basic for
someone who works in the field of psycholinguistics already. The different
topics that the book covers are not equally represented and the papers are not
straightforwardly grouped by theme or by language, which creates an impression
that the papers were selected based on what was available. Some related papers
are located next to each other, others are not. Out of all Slavic languages,
the Russian language is the focus of nine papers, while other languages are
underrepresented (which of course could be simply an indication that Russian
is the most widely studied). Most papers are related to morphology or lexical
access, and only a few touch on other areas, like sentence processing. While
the goal of the collection is to discuss the problems related to experimental
research in psycholinguistics, some papers do not provide enough details about
the original experiments they describe and call for the necessity to go back
to those original sources to fully understand and evaluate all the
conclusions. Finally, while most papers provide possible solutions to the
issues they encounter and useful specific suggestions, others only provide
common sense suggestions, or raise more questions than provide answers. 

All in all, the book might be useful for researchers who work on Slavic
languages in psycholinguistics; otherwise, researchers might find individual
papers from the book useful if they are closely related to their area of
interest. The book is altogether a good and necessary contribution to the
field of psycholinguistic research based on Slavic languages.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I earned PhD in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) in
2016, and currently I am a lecturer at the UTA department of Modern Languages
and at the department of Linguistics and TESOL. My research interests are
related to Russian language, psycholinguistics (sentence processing), and
second language acquisition. In my research, I use experimental methodology
(acceptability judgements, self-paced reading, eye tracking, etc.).





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