Slavic languages in psycholinguistics: Chances and challenges for empirical and experimental research ed. by Tanja Anstatt et al. (review)

This book is a result of the workshop on empirical psycholinguistic methods, "Slavic languages in the black box", which aimed to create a space for discussion of methodological problems in the field of Slavic psycholinguistics. The current volume goes beyond simple discussion. In 12 different contributions, it 1) offers an overview of the existing experimental designs, online and offline methods of investigation as well as various tasks that are employed in modern Slavic psycholinguistics research, 2) presents the key issues associated with these designs and methods, and, crucially, 3) suggests possible solutions to overcome the challenges. Below I briefly outline the content, summarize the takeaway message and provide a short review for each contribution of the volume. I conclude with a general evaluation of the book.

In the first paper of the volume, Barbara Mertins discusses several online and offline methods used inside and outside psycholinguistic research. The chapter starts with a brief classification of experimental methods as online (e.g., eye-tracking, elicitation), offline (e.g., surveys), and true online methods (e.g., EEG, fMRI), along with an outline of the potential benefits and drawbacks of using one technique over another. Next, Mertins concentrates on the evaluation of several methods that she and her colleagues employed in her language-production research: 1) elicitation, 2) memory tasks, 3) eye-tracking, 4) speech onset times, and 5) preference/grammatical judgment tasks. Finally, Mertins presents three experimental studies (authored by Mertins and other colleagues) that implemented either one technique or a combination of these methods in language-production studies, enabling the reader to observe the application of the techniques in experimental contexts. In the overview of each study, Mertins provides detailed information as well as a critical evaluation of the design, materials, randomization procedures, and general protocol (e.g., sample size, language background of the participants, stimulus length, amounts of fillers, coding procedure, etc.). Crucially, for each study, the contributor also points out benefits and issues that should be considered before planning to use one of the described methods in combination with a specific aspect of study design (e.g., elicitation method and intercultural suitability of the materials). The chapter also places an interesting focus (in study 2) on the importance of using a combination of linguistic and non-linguistic (e.g., memory) tasks to investigate the effects of language on cognition (i.e., language leads to differences in thinking). However, the link between these two types of tasks (especially the memory task) is not clear. It would be useful to provide researchers with more arguments for the necessity of adding non-linguistic tasks to the experiments. In general, the article, although likely not intended for this purpose, might serve as an excellent introduction for graduate students and early-career researchers to various psycholinguistic methods and advantages and caveats of the designs with the emphasis on language-production research.

Chapter 2 (by Roumyana Slabakova) shifts the focus of discussion from details of the experimental design to issues of the inconsistency of results caused by the variability in linguistic judgments of native Russian speakers. First, Slabakova introduces the results of her study (2004) that examines how native Russian speakers interpret telicity based on the perfectivity of the verb. Specifically, the goal of study 1 is to confirm that perfectivity of verbs in Russian (as an example of a Slavic language) dictates the (non-) quantization of the objects they refer to, an association known as Event-Object Homomorphism. Counter to expectations, the findings of the study indicated that Russian native speakers marked sentences with perfective verbs as having two possible interpretations (as opposed to one, as was expected) almost half of the time (49%). Slabakova argues that other factors than perfectivity of the verb come into play, e.g., free word order in Russian and Information Structure associated...