This study explores how speakers of German, Czech, and Russian read analog clocks and which of the two distinct systems for expressing time (absolute or relative) they tend to prefer. Additionally, we investigated the reference point hypothesis in languages that have not previously been studied in this context. Our findings reveal that speakers of German, Czech, and Russian predominantly use relative expressions. Furthermore, our in-depth analyses of time expressions in Czech and Russian revealed a propensity to transition from the absolute to the relative system near the hourly reference point. Conversely, in German, more varied expressions were found around the half-hour region, where the reference point shifts from the past to the upcoming hour. These results provide new insights into the traditions of time-telling in a cross-linguistic comparison.

Background/Objectives: Visuospatial impairments are among the earliest cognitive symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias (ADRD), yet standard assessments often lack ecological validity and focus on isolated domains. This study examines whether integrating linguistic, behavioral, and eye-tracking measures provides a more comprehensive characterization of cognitive deficits within a multimodal, exploratory framework. Methods: Twenty older adults (10 with mild to moderate dementia, including AD/ADRD, and 10 age-matched controls) completed three tasks: (1) oral narrative production, (2) visuospatial behavioral tasks (manipulation, recognition, reproduction), and (3) free-viewing eye-tracking. Linguistic, behavioral (time, errors), and fixation-based measures were analyzed using non-parametric statistics, with emphasis on effect sizes and cross-domain patterns. Results: The clinical group differed consistently from controls across domains. Linguistic measures showed increased output but reduced quality, including lower syntactic complexity, more grammatical errors, greater pragmatic deviations, and reduced gist comprehension. Behavioral tasks revealed slower performance and more frequent failures. Eye-tracking differences were less pronounced, showing a tendency toward longer fixations and less efficient visual exploration. A composite multimodal index showed clear separation between groups, indicating a consistent pattern of impairment across measures. Conclusions: Cognitive differences in dementia are expressed across multiple domains, with the strongest effects in linguistic and behavioral measures. These findings highlight the value of multimodal profiles for capturing multidimensional impairment. Results should be interpreted as exploratory and require confirmation in larger, confirmatory studies.

This study investigates how speakers’ initial fixations on analog clock regions (minute vs. hour hand) align with the production of relative and absolute time expressions in German, Czech, and Russian. Building on previous research on linguistic preferences in time‑telling, we tested whether fixation patterns primarily reflect syntactic word order, language‑specific expression preferences, or the interaction of both factors. Eye‑tracking data revealed broadly similar fixation patterns across languages for relative expressions: all groups tended to fixate first on the minute hand, consistent with syntactic structure and incremental planning models of language production by Levelt (Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1989). In contrast, different patterns emerged for absolute expressions. Russian speakers showed a significantly stronger hour-first fixation pattern, consistent with the syntactic structure of absolute time expressions (“hour before minute”). German and Czech participants, however, distributed their initial fixations almost evenly across both areas of interest (minute‑hand and hour‑hand regions), suggesting that their strong habitual preference for relative expressions may attenuate syntactic ordering effects when producing less familiar absolute constructions. We interpret these findings as indicating that visual attention during speech production is shaped not only by syntactic structure (i.e., the structural order of time expressions such as hour-first vs. minute-first) but also by habitual language use. Our results highlight how cognitive processes such as visual attention interact dynamically with language use across cultural contexts.

This study examines how architectural expertise shapes visual perception, extending the “Seeing for Speaking” hypothesis into a non-linguistic domain. Specifically, it investigates whether architectural training influences unconscious visual processing of architectural content. Using eye-tracking, 48 architects and 48 laypeople freely viewed 15 still images of built, mixed, and natural environments. Visual behavior was analyzed using Shannon’s entropy scores based on dwell times within 16 × 16 grids during the first six seconds of viewing. Results revealed distinct visual attention patterns between groups. Architects showed lower entropy, indicating more focused and systematic gaze behavior, and their attention was consistently drawn to built structures. In contrast, laypeople exhibited more variable and less organized scanning patterns, with greater individual differences. Moreover, architects demonstrated higher intra-group similarity in their gaze behavior, suggesting a shared attentional schema shaped by professional training. These findings highlight that domain-specific expertise deeply influences perceptual processing, resulting in systematic and efficient attention allocation. Entropy-based metrics proved effective in capturing these differences, offering a robust tool for quantifying expert vs. non-expert visual strategies in architectural cognition. The visual patterns exhibited by architects are interpreted to reflect a “Grammar of Space”, i.e., a structured way of visually parsing spatial elements.

Aim: This study investigates how simultaneous bilingual Norwegian-English children conceptualize goal-oriented motion events in their two languages, which have different and partly conflicting language-specific conceptualization patterns (the so-called holistic, endpoint-oriented perspective vs. a phasal perspective with focus on ongoingness). Design: The experiment combined three different methodologies to measure attention to endpoints: elicitation of spoken data, eye-tracking, and a subsequent memory test. A total of 23 bilingual Norwegian-English children participated on a separate day for each language. The comparison groups comprised monolingual Norwegian children (n = 21), first language (L1) Norwegian adults (n = 30), and L1 English adults (n = 20). Data and analysis: The statistical analysis included calculations of endpoints mentioned and endpoints remembered in each language and for both sessions, and an event-related analysis was conducted to establish the total length of all fixations on the areas of interest (AoIs [the endpoints]), in each language and for both sessions. Findings/conclusions: The results showed an effect of the language of operation on conceptualization, independent of language dominance, but depending on the situation. In their first session, the bilingual children showed a strong awareness of the prototypical conceptualization pattern in the language they were speaking. In their second session, the children's conceptualization was influenced by their first. Hence, we can talk about a flexible conceptual dominance linked to language, the situation, and to previous experience. Originality: This study for the first time explores simultaneous bilingual children's conceptualization of goal-oriented motion events in their two languages and with different methodologies. Significance/implications: This study brings new insights into our understanding of early bilingualism at a conceptual level, with implications for the field, but also for parents, caregivers, and stakeholders, who at times need to be reminded about children's unique capacity for language learning.

A new algorithm to identify a representative scanpath in a sample is presented and evaluated with eye-tracking data. According to Gestalt theory, each fixation of the scanpath should be on an area of interest (AOI) of the stimuli. As with existing methods, we first identify the AOIs and then extract the fixations of the representative scanpath from the AOIs. In contrast to existing methods, we propose a new concept of short-time AOI and extract the fixations of representative scanpath from the short-time AOIs. Our method outperforms the existing methods on two publicly available datasets. Our method can be applied to arbitrary visual stimuli, including static stimuli without natural segmentation, as well as dynamic stimuli. Our method also provides a solution for issues caused by the selection of scanpath similarity.

s Der Sprachkontakt zwischen dem Deutschen und verschiedenen slawischen Sprachen ist sowohl diachron als auch synchron in der Forschung gut beschrieben. Inwiefern ist aber das Deutsche die jeweiligen Sprachsysteme beeinflusst hat, ist ganz unterschiedlich. Der vorliegende Beitrag macht sich zum Ziel, herauszufinden, welche historische, soziolinguistische und linguistische Faktoren dazu geführt haben konnten, dass sehr ähnliche Sprachkontaktbedingungen im Endergebnis ganz verschiedene Kontakteffekte hervorgebracht haben. Es wird also der Frage nachgegangen, warum beispielsweise das Deutsche das Tschechische so stark beeinflusst hat, dass sogar das aspektuelle System durchlässig wurde und sich somit dem Deutschen angepasst hat, während z.B. das Polnische, das ebenso mit dem Deutschen im langen Austausch stand, in dem zugrundeliegenden aspektuellen System keine systematischen Veränderungen vornahm. The language contact between German and various Slavic languages has been well described and studied, both diachronically and synchronically. However, the extent to which German has influenced the respective language system seems to be very different. The aim of the present article is to find out which historical, sociolinguistic and linguistic factors could have led to the fact that very similar language contact conditions ultimately produced very different contact effects. The question is therefore pursued as to why, for example, German influenced Czech so strongly that even the aspectual system became permeable and thus adapted to German, while e.g., Polish, which also had a long-lasting contact to German, no systematic changes to the underlying aspectual system can be observed. Keywords: language contact, functional bilingualism, sociolinguistic/historical factors

The description of goal-oriented motion events differs cross-linguistically. Speakers of languages with a phasal perspective (such as Russian) describe these events as a process, while speakers of languages with a holistic perspective (such as Czech) emphasize the final state of the event, i.e., an endpoint. For instance, when someone walks toward a house, Czech speakers are more likely to mention the house as an endpoint in their description than Russian speakers (Schmiedtová, 2013a). This paper investigates the prominence of endpoints during language acquisition of Czech preschoolers in three experiments. Firstly, we investigate the frequency of endpoint expression in Czech children (N=40) in an elicitation task compared to an interactive setting. Secondly, we compare the endpoint production of Czech children (n=25) with that of Russian children (n=25). Lastly, we examine whether visual fixations on endpoints increase in Czech children (n=75) with age. The results show that Czech children produced more endpoints in the interactive setting than in the elicitation task. We did not find a significant difference between the overall number of endpoints produced by Russian and Czech children. However, there were significant differences in the types of utterances in which the children were expressing them. The eye-tracking data did not show a gradual increase in attention to endpoints with age. Our findings suggest that parent–child interaction is crucial in directing children’s attention toward endpoints. However, Czech children appear to be considerably independent in their production of endpoints. This study provides insights into how Czech children describe and perceive endpoints, a topic that has not been previously analyzed.

The present paper explores how young children, depending on the provided input, acquire language-specific perspectives in the construal of goal-oriented locomotion events. We recorded parent-child interactions using drawings depicting such events. Czech monolingual pairs (n = 25), Russian monolingual pairs (n = 25), and Russian-German bilingual pairs (n = 22) were recruited for this study. Previous findings (Mertins 2018; Stutterheim et al. 2012) have demonstrated that Russian speakers conceptualize goal-oriented locomotion under the phasal perspective. Czech speakers, on the other hand, rely on the holistic perspective and are thus similar to German native speakers. In languages with a holistic perspective, speakers tend to focus on the endpoints of locomotion events. Therefore, we analyzed their prevalence in the parental language. The analyses revealed that Czech parents produced significantly more endpoints in the description of the critical stimuli than Russian and Russian-German parents. We argue that conceptual preferences and the verbalization of goal-oriented locomotion are input driven and acquired in early childhood.

This paper presents a model that allows group comparisons of gaze behavior while watching dynamic video stimuli. The model is based on the approach of Coutrot and Guyader (2017) and allows linear combinations of feature maps to form a master saliency map. The feature maps in the model are, for example, the dynamically salient contents of a video stimulus or predetermined areas of interest. The model takes into account temporal aspects of the stimuli, which is a crucial difference to other common models. The multi-group extension of the model introduced here allows to obtain relative importance plots, which visualize the effect of a specific feature of a stimulus on the attention and visual behavior for two or more experimental groups. These plots are interpretable summaries of data with high spatial and temporal resolution. This approach differs from many common methods for comparing gaze behavior between natural groups, which usually only include single-dimensional features such as the duration of fixation on a particular part of the stimulus. The method is illustrated by contrasting a sample of a group of persons with particularly high cognitive abilities (high achievement on IQ tests) with a control group on a psycholinguistic task on the conceptualization of motion events. In the example, we find no substantive differences in relative importance, but more exploratory gaze behavior in the highly gifted group. The code, videos, and eye-tracking data we used for this study are available online.

This paper presents first findings from an offline study of Czech native speakers’ use and interpretation of reflexive and non-reflexive possessive pronouns. The study is part of a larger possessive project outlined by Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017), leaning on the comprehension experiment presented in Pitz et al. (2017). The study encompasses questionnaire data collected from 259 informants who were tested under four different conditions on two competing pronouns: the reflexive possessive (svůj) and the 3rd person non-reflexive possessive (jeho). The results revealed that Czech native speakers show a strong uncertainty when interpreting constructions with a cataphoric non-reflexive possessive. This shows that even for native speakers, the establishment of the anaphoric and cataphoric relations under certain syntactic conditions is a challenging and highly complex task. With these results, several hypotheses are formulated in various target-source-language pairs concerning the processing of reflexive and non-reflexive possessives in L2.

Syntactic language features of word problems have often been identified by assessment studies and interview studies as potential obstacles in word problem solving. However, students’ processes of noticing and interpreting these features have only rarely been investigated in depth because noticing is hard to investigate. Eye-tracking methodology has already been shown to be a suitable methodology for analyzing noticing other word problem features, but not yet for syntactic features. The longitudinal eye-tracking study presented here analyzes fifth graders’ processes of noticing and interpreting of syntactic word problems before and after an intervention on word problem solving. Based on the eye-mind hypothesis, the study captures students’ noticing through eye-tracking, whereas interpreting can be captured by their solutions. The analysis of pre-intervention data reveals that long fixations cannot be identified with successful noticing and vice versa. But when comparing the net dwell time (i.e., the time that students look at the words indicating syntactic structures) before and after the intervention, an interesting decrease is revealed. This decrease occurs for both expected and less expected syntactic structures, regardless of the accuracy of mathematization. Meanwhile, analyzing the revisits of students indicates differences between items with more or less expected structures and correctly or incorrectly mathematized items. Methodologically, the article contributes to understanding which eye-tracking measures are relevant for capturing changes in students’ processes of noticing syntactic language features: The revisits and scan paths reveal more insights than the net dwell time.

AbstractMuch of how we sequence events in speech mirrors the order of their natural occurrence. While event chains that conform to chronology may be easier to process, languages offer substantial freedom to manipulate temporal order. This article explores to what extent digressions from chronology are attributable to differences in grammatical aspect systems. We compared reverse order reports (RORs) in event descriptions elicited from native speakers of four languages, two with (Spanish, Modern Standard Arabic [MSA]) and two without grammatical aspect (German, Hungarian). In the Arabic group, all participants were highly competent MSA speakers from Palestine and Jordan. Standardized frequency counts showed significantly more RORs expressed by non-aspect groups than by aspect groups. Adherence to chronology changing as a function of contrast in grammatical aspect signal that languages without obligatory marking of ongoingness may provide more flexibility for event reordering. These findings bring novel insights about the dynamic interplay between language structure and temporal sequencing in the discourse stream.

Inhalt 4.3 Ergebnisse  86 4.4 Fazit und Diskussion  89 4.5 Zusammenfassung  91 5 Wie grammatikalisierte Kategorien die Ereigniskonzeptualisierung für die Sprachproduktion prägen: Erkenntnisse aus Sprach analysen, Messungen der Augenbewegungen und Gedächtnisleistungsexperimenten  93 5.1 Einführung  93 5.2 Bisherige Studien und Forschungsstand  95 5.3 Die Studie  98 5.3.1 Typologische Klassifikation  98 5.3.2Aspektsysteme und Sprachgebrauch  99 5.3.3Hypothesen  102 5.4 Experiment: Messung der Blickbewegungen in dynamischen Szenen  103 5.4.1 Probanden  103 5.4.2Technische Ausstattung  103 5.4.3Stimulusmaterial  104 5.4.4Ablauf  105 5.4.5 Datenkodierung und -analyse  106 5.5 Ergebnisse  108 5.5.1 Sprachproduktionsdaten  108 5.5.2Eye-Tracking-Analysen  111 5.5.2.1 Gesamtzahl der Fixationen nach Probandengruppen (F1-Analyse)  112 5.5.2.2 Gesamtzahl der Fixationen je Videoclip (F2-Analyse)  114 5.5.2.3 Gesamtfixationsdauer per Teilnehmer (F1-Analyse)  114 5.5.2.4 Gesamtfixationsdauer je Videoclip (F2-Analyse)  115 5.5.2.5 Fixationen in der AoI: Erste und zweite Fixationsperiode  116 5.5.2.6 Anzahl in der ersten Fixationsperiode je Teilnehmer (F1)  116 5.5.2.7 Anzahl in der ersten Fixationsperiode je Videoclip (F2)  118 5.5.2.8 Anzahl in der zweiten Fixationsperiode je Teilnehmer (F1)  118 5.5.2.9 Anzahl in der zweiten Fixationsperiode je Videoclips (F2)  118 5.5.2.10 Zusammenfassung und Diskussion der linguistischen und Eye-Tracking-Analysen  119 5.5.3Gedächtnistests  121 5.5.3.1 Stimulusmaterial  121 5.5.3.2Vorgehensweise  121 X Inhalt 7.4.4Stimulusmaterial: Sprachproduktions-und Gedächtnisaufgabe  174 7.4.5 Technische Ausstattung  176 7.4.6Experimentdurchführung  176 7.4.7 Datenkodierung und -analyse  177 7.5 Ergebnisse  179 7.5.1 Sprachproduktionsdaten  179 7.5.2Eye-Tracking-Daten  180 7.5.2.1 Gesamtzahl der Fixationen  181 7.5.2.2 Gesamtblicke in die AoI  182 7.5.2.3 Fixationen in der AoI: Gesamtblicke in der ersten Zeitspanne  183 7.5.3Gedächtnisaufgabe  184 7.6 Diskussion der Forschungsergebnisse  185 7.7 Fazit und Diskussion  188 7.8 Zusammenfassung  188 8 Die Rolle des grammatischen Aspekts in der Ereignisenkodierung: Ein Vergleich zwischen tschechischen und russischen Lernern des Deutschen  189 8.1 Einführung  189 8.2 Theoretischer Hintergrund  191 8.2.1 Zum Aspektbegriff in slawischen Sprachen  191 8.2.1.1Der grammatische Aspekt  191 8.2.1.2Bildung der Aspektformen  193 8.2.1.3Der lexikalische Aspekt  194 8.2.2 Morphologische und lexikalische Mittel der Endpunktmarkierung  196 8.3 Fragestellung  198 8.4 Die Studie  199 8.4.1 Probanden  199 8.4.2Experimentablauf  201 8.5 Analysebereiche und Ergebnisse  201 8.5.1 Aspektgebrauch  202 8.5.2Tempusgebrauch  205 8.5.3 Endpunkte  208 8.6

espanolEn este articulo se investigan los recursos linguisticos que los hablantes utilizan para producir instrucciones de ruta coherentes y comprensibles. Estos recursos incluyen el manejo del flujo de informacion de una frase a la siguiente, la distribucion de las informaciones sobre los tramos de la ruta y la codificacion linguistica de la informacion para ser organizada como un texto. El objetivo del articulo es demostrar que las diferencias sintacticas entre el espanol y el aleman repercuten en la microestructura de las instrucciones de ruta, de forma que aparecen patrones caracteristicos para cada idioma. Estas diferencias incluyen la subordinacion y la restriccion del cruce de frontera en las lexicalizaciones de eventos de movimiento. Los analisis estan basados en un corpus de 124 instrucciones de ruta recogidas empiricamente. Los resultados consisten en patrones diferentes y caracteristicos para cada idioma que afectan el flujo y el empaquetamiento de la informacion. EnglishThis paper investigates which linguistic resources speakers use to produce understandable and coherent route directions. These resources include how the information flows from one sentence to the next, how the information is mapped onto the topological route and how this information is encoded linguistically in order to be organized into a text. The aim of this paper is to show that syntactical differences between Spanish and German (the marking of subordination and the boundary crossing constraint) have consequences for the way the information is structured in route directions. The analyses are based on a corpus of 124 empirically collected route directions. The results include language-specific differences regarding information flow and information packaging.

The paper addresses some of the pitfalls connected with the investigation of the language of aphasic patients. In total, ten pitfalls are presented and briefly discussed: three of them are related to neurological and psycho-social aspects, two to linguistic-empirical aspects, and one to the overall cognitive system. There are also three pitfalls focusing on methodological issues and one addressing the logistics of empirical research on aphasic patients.

This paper presents and discusses the results of an experiment testing the validity of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (Grodzinsky 1989, 2000) in Czech. The Trace Deletion Hypothesis (= TDH) was proposed to account for a receptive syntactic deficit in Broca’s aphasics that involves structures containing transformational operations such as the passive. According to the assumptions of the TDH, in passive constructions Broca’s aphasics fail to assign a semantic θ-role to the derived subject syntactically, so they assign it the Agent θ-role by linear consideration (Default Principle), which results in a structure with two potential Agents. This strategy is supposed to lead to the chance performance of Broca’s aphasics in these structures, as they are forced to guess the distribution of the Agent and the Patient θ-roles. The results of our experiment, however, do not support the TDH-proposal: out of the six tested subjects, only one performed at chance. The error rate for reversible passive structures in Czech was 33.34%, which corresponds to an above-chance performance. Given these results, the validity of the TDH is called into question, also with respect to the development of the generative theory itself.