Projects

The goal of this project is to investigate English loan words in Croatian, their frequency, cognitive processing in an L1 environment, the differences in L2 proficiency and their impact on cognitive processing, as well as associative relations between English words and Croatian words. 

The omnipresence of specific conceptual metaphors in world languages has already been established in previous studies, many of which have indicated that L2 vocabulary motivated by metaphors also present in the learner's L1 is understood more readily than other linguistic expressions. METLA mission is to provide an extensive database of conceptual metaphors in Croatian so as to facilitate the EFL/ESP teacher by providing them with an additional learning tool. Our current research goals include the compilation of Croatian metaphors and comparative analysis of metaphors in Croatian and English.

It is the main aim of this project to ensure valid stimuli for a pilot ERP study which will investigate the nature of MWE processing in ESP students within the framework of CMT (Conceptual Metaphor Theory) according to which formulaic language is organized and motivated by structures known as conceptual metaphors (CMs). For the purpose of stimuli design, the following activities are planned for implementation: 1) the choice of metaphors whose existence has been established in both Croatian (L1) and English (L2); 2) the choice of multi-word units (verb-noun collocations) existent in both L1 and L2; 3) conducting a normative study the purpose of which is to identify variables affecting the validity of the stimuli such as familiarity and metaphoricity of the chosen MWEs. The project will directly contribute to the development of linguistic research methodology since it will allow for the comparison of data collected in an L2 context. At the same time, a detailed stimuli compilation procedure will ensure the study's replicability as well as data transparency.

The goal of this project is to create a large databases of Croatian word and different affective norms. Databases will allow experimental research in Croatian, a language with a considerable lack of psycholinguistic norms and provide a useful tool in the investigation of the relationship between language and emotion for the South-Slavic group of languages.

The goal of this project is to investigate the cognitive processing of various negative sentences in Croatian and to compare the results with other languages. Moreover, the project aims to outline a new Cue-step theoretical model that accounts for the cognitive processing of negations. Prior studies focused on the processing of implicit negations and effects of truth value on affirmations and sentential negations, what might be partially attributed to the lack of knowledge about linguistic cues that drive the processing of negations. NegRi project is focusing on explicit negations: double and lexical negation, and negative concord. It is investigating whether the processing of lexical and double negations and negative concord depend on syntactic and semantic cues. To accomplish that goal, the project is combining behavioral and EEG/ERPs experiments.

Language processing research conducted with event-related potentials (ERPs) has shown how brain activity changes depending on the linguistic level being processed, which, in turn, results in specific waveforms of the EEG signal, the so-called ERP components. The N400 component is considered to be the indicator of linguistic processing on both semantic and pragmatic levels. Its amplitude is proportional to the degree to which a word deviates from its previous sentential or discourse context and the speaker's knowledge of the world, that is, how much it deviates from the speaker's expectations on the meaning of the word to follow. The experiment performed as a part of this project will examine the amplitude of the N400 elicited by semantically anomalous words presented in sentence context.