STUDIES IN LANGUAGE AND MIND Edited by Sabina Halupka-Rešetar and Silvia Martínez-Ferreiro Novi Sad, 2016 STUDIES IN LANGUAGE AND MIND SELECTED PAPERS FROM THE 3RD WORKSHOP IN PSYCHOLINGUISTIC, NEUROLINGUISTIC AND CLINICAL LINGUISTIC RESEARCH Edited by Sabina Halupka-Rešetar and Silvia Martínez-Ferreiro Novi Sad, 2016 UNIVERSITY OF NOVI SAD FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English Editor-in-Chief: Dr Ivana Živančević Sekeruš, Dean Editors: Dr Sabina Halupka-Rešetar Dr Silvia Martínez-Ferreiro Reviewers of the volume: Dr Aleksandar Kostić, University of Belgrade, Serbia Dr Petar Milin, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany Dr Maja Miličević, University of Belgrade, Serbia ISBN 978-86-6065-359-0 Filozofski fakultet u Novom Sadu Odsek za anglistiku Dr Zorana Đinđića 2, 21000 Novi Sad Tel: +381 21 485 3900 +381 21 485 3852 www.ff.uns.ac.rs CONTENTS Preface ..........................................................................................................5 Chapter 1: Clinical Linguistics in Bosnian / Croatian / Montenegrin / Serbian (BCMS): Down syndrome, Specific Language Impairment and aphasia Silvia Martínez-Ferreiro, Sabina Halupka-Rešetar and Alexandra Perovic ...............................................................................11 Chapter 2: Effect of animacy and agentivity on the processing of agreement in Serbo-Croatian Boban Arsenijević and Ivana Mitić ............................................................41 Chapter 3: Distributivity and Agreement mismatches in Serbian Ana Bosnić .................................................................................................77 Chapter 4: Verb production at different stages of language acquisition Nina Ilić ...................................................................................................107 Chapter 5: Presentation modality interacts with the effect of visual perceptual strength on word processing Dušica Filipović Đurđević, Jelena Karapandžić, Jasmina Arsenijević Mijalković ..............................................................161 Chapter 6: A quest for sources of perceptual richness: Several candidates Dušica Filipović Đurđević, Milica Popović Stijačić and Jelena Karapandžić ..........................................................................187 PREFACE This publication is a selection of papers presented at the 3rd workshop in Psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic and clinical linguistic research, which was held at the University of Novi Sad on April 18th 2015. During this one- day event, researchers from five countries and six university centres pre- sented their work with the aim of encouraging an interdisciplinary approach to researching the neurocognitive foundation of language in linguistically non-impaired and impaired populations. The volume contains six chapters. Each of the papers submitted to the volume received two blind reviews and in some cases additional comments from the editors. The papers in the volume are organized thematically, start- ing with a general overview of research in the field of clinical linguistics re- search conducted with speakers of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Ser- bian (BCMS or Serbo-Croatian).This introductory chapter, co-authored by Silvia Martínez-Ferreiro, Sabina Halupka-Rešetar and Alexandra Perović summarizes studies of genetic, developmental and acquired disorders con- ducted with subjects who are native speakers of one of these South Slavic languages, including Down syndrome, Specific Language Impairment and aphasia. As studies of language deficits in the four languages mentioned are still rather scarce, the paper concludes with a brief discussion and a set of suggestions for future research in the field of clinical linguistics. The following five chapters present recent empirical findings in BCMS, conducted with non-brain damaged individuals and children. In Chapter 2, ‘Effect of animacy and agentivity on the processing of agreement in Serbo-Croatian’, Boban Arsenijević and Ivana Mitić reported on two ex- periments, one involving acceptability judgments and the other production, focused on the effects of animacy and agentivity, respectively, on the choice of the pattern of agreement of the verb with a coordinated subject in Serbo- Croatian (given that Serbo-Croatian coordinated subjects with mixed gen- der values allow for three patterns of agreement: agreement with the first member of coordination, agreement with the last member, and agreement 5 with the entire coordination). The experimental results lead the authors to the conclusion that animacy has a general degrading effect on coordinated subjects, which is very strong in agreement patterns involving agreement with the closest member of coordination, and weaker in expressions in- volving agreement with the highest member of coordination and default agreement. Only agreement with the member of coordination which is both lowest and farthest away from the subject was in no way affected. Agentiv- ity seems to show a somewhat different effect, as it decreases the number of produced instances of agreement with the linearly closest member of coordination, but increases the number of produced expressions involving agreement with the highest member of coordination, with no significant ef- fect on other patterns of agreement. Arsenijević and Mitić take these results as evidence in support of the family of approaches in which agreement with the linearly closest member of coordination is one of the available strate- gies, and in which it takes place at the interface between syntax and pho- nology. Default agreement is shown to involve features which are present already in syntax, but they do not compete with phonological agreement. In ‘Distributivity and Agreement mismatches in Serbian’, Ana Bosnić presents the results of a truth value judgment study done on two types of nu- merals in the Serbian numerical system, namely paucal and mixed-gender, and the corresponding verbal agreement mismatch that is characteristic for the numerals in question. Although recent work on agreement and distribu- tivity suggests that singular verbal marking promotes distributivity while plural marking can be interpreted as both distributive and collective, Ser- bian informants have shown opposite intuitions – singular appeared to sug- gest collectivity and plural marking denoted distributivity. Given the highly inflectional nature of the Serbian language, the chapter authored by Bosnić investigates the extent to which verbal agreement influences interpretation preferences. The two types of numerals were used with singular and plu- ral verbal agreement on two groups of participants, adults and 7-year-old children. Neither group showed a significant correlation between verbal agreement and collective/distributive interpretations. Adults accepted col- lective readings and dispreferred distributive ones, while children accepted both distributive and collective readings for all sentence forms, even at their early age. This is taken to suggest that morpho-syntactic inflections might not be strong markers for distributivity and collectivity, contrary to what 6 has been proposed in the literature, and it leads the author to propose an alternative explanation in which adults understand numerically quantified sentences without distributive markers as scalar implicatures – since there is a better alternative to convey a distributive message, numerically quantified sentences must be collective. On the other hand, the complex morpho-syn- tactic system of Serbian seems to load children’s working memory, which affects the processing of such ambiguous sentences. In Chapter 4, ‘Verb production at different stages of language acqui- sition’, Nina Ilić aims to contribute to the ongoing debate between nativ- ists and constructivists by examining the order in which different types of verbs with different argument structure are acquired (unergative, unaccusa- tive, anti-causative, transitive and ditransitive verbs). Twelve subjects (1;11 - 4;10 years old) classified into age groups participated in the structured interviews of this transversal study. Children were asked to name actions based on visual stimuli such as toys and drawings. Though the sample was small, across-group differences were noted. The results confirm that chil- dren who are at an earlier stage of speech development have more difficulty producing verbs with a complex argument structure and are most successful in producing verbs which show a subject-agent correspondence. However, anti-causatives, which are also one-place predicates, are produced at a much later stage (2;7 years in this research). The results show that the order of acquisition of verbs is the following: transitive, unergative, unaccusative, ditransitive and anti-causative verbs. The author also stresses that the par- ticipants in the study used adequate tense morphology on the verbs from the earliest age, which is taken to indicate that they can recognize verbs as members of a coherent syntactic category, different from that of nouns. Thus, the results obtained are taken to favour the nativist approach. Chapter 5, co-authored by Dušica Filipović Đurđević, Jelena Kara- pandžić and Jasmina Arsenijević Mijalković and entitled ‘Presentation mo- dality interacts with the effect of visual perceptual strength on word pro- cessing’ investigates the effect of visual perceptual strength across abstract and concrete words, as well as its relation with the modality in which a word is presented. Relying on Perceptual Symbol Theory and