Slavic Languages in Psycholinguistics

Book excerpt: 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.