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Effects of Word Imageability on the Acquisition of Grammatical Morphology in Czech Children
Kříž, Adam ; Smolík, Filip (advisor) ; Chromý, Jan (referee)
(in English): In many studies there was demonstrated that word's imageability - the ability of a word to produce a mental image of it's referent - affects the processing of its inflection (e.g. Prado - Ullman, 2009), its acquisition (e.g. McDonough et al., 2011) and the acquisition of grammatical morphemes (Smolík, in press). This thesis builds on the Smolík's paper, and its goal is to test whether the imageability of a word's stem influences the acquisition of its inflections in Czech children. Word imageability ratings and ratings of other variables that were assumed to affect the process of the acquisition of word inflections, were collected, then questionnaires were distributed to parents to examine how the forms of chosen words are acquired by children. The focus was on the acquisition of nominative plural of nouns, present tense in second person and past tense of verbs. The results show that the imageability significantly predicts the age of acquisition of the nominative in singular and all observed forms of verbs. The absence of the imegability effect on the acquisition of nominative in plural may be due to the overall high imageability and thus reduced variability of ratings in nouns in our dataset. Two possible explanations of the imageability effect on the acqusition of morphological...
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Sociolinguistic aspects of Czech as a foreign language
Hájková, Marcela ; Šebesta, Karel (advisor) ; Chromý, Jan (referee)
This thesis systematically examines the sociolinguistic aspects of Czech as a foreign language and maps if and in what way such aspects are reflected in current language learning and teaching practice as seen in new and commonly used textbooks. The author draws from the general principles of a communicative approach and the fundamental materials for language learning and teaching in Europe. In the theoretical part the key terms "communicative competence" and "communicative situation" are defined and the general requirements for textbooks are formulated. The practical part is devoted to analysing several of the textbooks used by foreigners to learn Czech. Of the areas observed (selection of communicative situations, and the proportion and presentation thereof; the contents which develop the sociocultural and sociolinguistic competences; the representation and presentation of language variants), the degree of focus on colloquial Czech (i.e. common spoken language) was found to be the most problematic. To rectify this issue, possible solutions are then suggested.
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Spatial cognition of users of spoken Czech and Czech Sign Language: How cross-linguistic diversity affects non-linguistic thought
Jehlička, Jakub ; Chromý, Jan (advisor) ; Smolík, Filip (referee)
The thesis focuses on how different languages influence spatial cognition of their speakers, i. e., whether and how the differences in spatial language (linguistic representation of perspective, location, spatial scenes etc.) affect the non-linguistic spatial reasoning (orientation, spatial memory etc.). This issue has for a long time been a part of the studies of the relation between language and thouhgt under the flag of so called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis/Hypothesis of linguistic relativity. In the first half of the theoretical part of the thesis, I attempt to summarize the history of the concept of linguistic relativity since 1950s and to revise some critical claims about linguistic relativity by re-reading Whorf's works (chapter 2). The second half of the theoretical part (chapter 3) focuses in particular on the research of the interrelations between spatial thought and language. In section 3.1, I make a brief note on the notion of space in terms of cognitive linguistics. Section 3.2 provides an selective overview of the previous research of the crosslinguic spatial-cognitive diversity. Sections 3.3 and 3.4 connect the theoretical and the empirical part of the thesis. The research itself is presented in the chapter 4. It experimentally tests the hypothesis, that the language-specific...
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Argument semantics and relative frequency in the comprehension of the passive construction in persons with aphasia
Pospíšilová, Eva ; Láznička, Michal (advisor) ; Chromý, Jan (referee)
This bachelor thesis deals with the influence of argument semantics and relative frequency of passive voice on the understanding of Czech passive construction in people with aphasia. The aim of the work is to design an experiment that will examine the factors connected with the agrammatic understanding in Czech, and test it on a group of neurotypic speakers. Theoretical chapters of this thesis are devoted to a general description of aphasia, linguistic aphasiology and manifestations of aphasic syndromes in Czech. They also present the basic results of previous research which examined the understanding of semantically reversible passive sentences in patients with aphasia. In the final theoretical chapter, findings from foreign aphasiological literature, which highlighted the relationship between the level of understanding of complex syntactic structures and their frequency, are discussed. The experimental part of the text focuses on the design of the actual experiment. Based on a corpus analysis, a total of 24 verbs with high and low relative frequency of passive forms were selected, each verb was used in four sentences with different combinations of voice, relative frequency of passive and (in)animacy of patient. To verify comprehension, the self-paced reading method was chosen along with...
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Lexical retrieval in Russian-Czech bilingual speakers
Maslova, Alexandra ; Chromý, Jan (advisor) ; Saicová Římalová, Lucie (referee)
The present thesis is devoted to the lexical acquisition of bilingual speakers in their first language, specifically Russian-speaking individuals living in the Czech Republic. The aim of the thesis is to follow up on previous foreign and Czech studies, focusing on the lexical acquisition of bilingual speakers. Such lexical acquisition is slower in their first language than the acquisition of comparable monolingual individuals. In the theoretical part, the thesis discusses the concepts of bilingualism, lexical deficit and language dominance, and presents an analysis of several recent foreign and Czech studies on the topic of lexical acquisition of bilingual speakers. In next part, we introduce the Russian-speaking community in the Czech Republic and the speech behaviour of this minority in the Czech Republic. The core of the thesis is a sophisticated experimental research design, which includes a verbal fluency test, a picture naming task and a questionnaire survey. The pre- survey for the picture naming task was conducted with participation of 243 respondents whose mother tongue is Russian. The output of the paper is a design of an experiment that can be followed up by further research. Keywords bilingualism, lexical acquisition, linguistic dominance, Russian-speaking community in the Czech Republic
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Garden-path sentences processing in high-school students with Czech as a native language
Ceháková, Markéta ; Chromý, Jan (advisor) ; Saicová Římalová, Lucie (referee)
The presented thesis focuses on garden-path sentence processing in Czech and follows the line of research within the good-enough approach to language comprehension. Some studies within this framework suggest that, after a garden-path sentence is reanalysed, a full and complete syntactic representation is formed, but the system fails to prune the initial misanalysis completely (Slattery et al., 2013; Qian et al., 2017). However, the research of garden-path sentences within the good-enough approach stems from a limited number of syntactic structures. This thesis presents a series of three self-paced reading experiments employing open-ended comprehension questions that aim to test if the conclusions of Slattery et al. (2013) can also be applied to syntactic structures that have not yet been examined within this framework, namely senteces such as "Roztržitý kastelán zamkl průvodkyni na nádvoří koloběžku.". The results are only partially in accordance with the hypothesis. The lingering misanalysis effect was shown only for the sentences with an animate object (these sentences were generally harder to process). Sentences with an inanimate object, that are easier to analyse, show no difference in response accuracy in comparison with similar unambiguous sentences. Keywords: garden-path sentences,...
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Lexical retrieval in Czech-Polish bilinguals
Karešová, Pavla ; Chromý, Jan (advisor) ; Rejzek, Jiří (referee)
This bachelor thesis presents the methodology of psycholinguistic experiment which focuses on lexical retrieval of bilingual speakers from the Czech Teschen region who are highly fluent in Czech and Polish. The theoretical part defines this region from both linguistic and historical point of view, then focuses on the speech production of a bilingual speaker and summarizes previous experiments that dealt with lexical retrieval in terms of bilingual speakers with high fluency in two languages. Based on the studied literature and the presented experiments, the thesis presents its own methodology of psycholinguistic experiment with detailed process of selection of participants for the experimental bilingual group and two control groups. To examine the lexical retrieval of bilingual speakers, the thesis then proposes two methods: the picture naming task and the test of verbal fluency. As part of the picture naming task, an experimental set of images is presented. This set was created on the basis of standardization between Czech and Polish speakers. The experimental set of pictures was selected mainly on the basis of the cognate status. For the test of verbal fluency, specific categories were proposed for semantic and letter fluency. The conclusion expresses several hypotheses which relate within the...
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Developmental tendencies in the noun inflection variation in the Karviná vernacular
Ochodková, Markéta ; Chromý, Jan (advisor) ; Dittmann, Robert (referee)
The work focuses on the varying forms of nouns in the common speech of the inhabitants of Karviná. Based on the previous literature on nominal declension in Silesian territory in conjunction with the native speaker's own experience, several varying morphological phenomena were selected for analysis, namely hard declension of soft noun patterns in the singular (muž/muža, moři/mořu, růže/růža) and unification of plural forms, especially in dative, locative and instrumental (dative to -am, locative to -ach, instrumental to -ami / -ama). Three data collection techniques were used for the research: a shorter sociolinguistic interview, which provided a general insight into the speech of selected speakers and served to find out the necessary demographic information; controlled oral elicitation, where the participants of the research were directed by prepared questions to the use of the investigated morphological phenomena; and an online questionnaire that provided information on conscious notions of the use of the studied phenomena, which will be confronted with information from the previous two techniques of data collection, interview and elicitation. The aim of this work is to describe a certain development of language in Karviná, based on a comparison of the younger generation (15-20 years) and older...
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Language behaviour of native speakers of Slovak in Bohemia
Kříž, Adam ; Chromý, Jan (advisor) ; Bordag, Denisa (referee) ; Vanek, Norbert (referee)
The thesis covers sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of Czech and Slovak language relations. To both fields, it contributes in the form of own empirical research. At the centre of attention are native speakers of Slovak living long-term in Czechia and their language behaviour under this setting in relation to Czech and Slovak. Given that two languages in question are genetically very close and mutual intelligible, the actual language behaviour of the described population is not strictly predetermined by the social norms (Dickins, 2009). However, there are also conditions supporting the accommodation to Czech (Sloboda, 2005). The thesis focuses on the identification of factors influencing language choice and on the impacts of such factors on the psychlinguistic processing of Slovak and Czech words. The sociolinguistic part builds on questionnaire-based surveys, such as those conducted by Sloboda (2006). The own questionnaire survey was carried out via web. The data from 651 respondents were assessed, all from native speakers of Slovak having grown up in Slovakia and commencing their stay in Czechia after the age of 18. The data revealed that Slovak is used more than Czech, that Czech is more often perceived, that the use of Czech is more common in the communication with strangers or in...
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Bilingualism as a disadvantage? Lexical retrieval in the bilinguals' first language
Hamanová, Marie - Anna ; Chromý, Jan (advisor) ; Chládková, Kateřina (referee)
The thesis focuses on lexical retrieval in bilinguals' first language. The aim of the work is to follow up on the research conducted abroad which has shown that lexical retrieval in the first language of bilinguals is slower than lexical retrieval in matched monolinguals. The present thesis is based on an experiment consisting of a verbal fluency task and a picture naming task; the participants were 152+120 students of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University with varying levels of their L2 (ranging from speakers with low proficiency in L2 to almost balanced bilinguals). In contrast to the previous research, this project thus views L2 proficiency as differentiated along a scale. The results of both tasks suggest that lexical retrieval in native speakers of Czech with high proficiency in L2 is not slower than in matched speakers with low proficiency in L2. Analysis of reaction times in the picture naming task also indicates the involvement of frequency and cognate effects.
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