Native Speakers Of Polish Research Articles

Polish Translation and Validation of the SCHNOS (Standardized Cosmesis and Health Nasal Outcomes Survey) Questionnaire.

<b>Introduction:</b> Rhinoseptoplasty procedures are focused not only on the aesthetic but also on the functional aspects. Surgical outcomes have to be evaluated in each patient. To date, the Polish literature has lacked a tool facilitating simultaneous assessment of rhinoseptoplasty's impact on both the external appearance and functionality of the nose.<b>Aim:</b> The aim of this study was to translate, adapt, and validate the Polish version of the original SCHNOS (Standardized Cosmesis and Health Nasal Outcomes Survey) questionnaire as used for the assessment of the functional and aesthetic outcomes in patients after rhinoplasty.<b>Materials and methods:</b> A total of 31 subjects (N = 24 [77.4%] women and N = 7 men [22.6%]) aged 19 through 55 years (M = 31.32; SD = 8.50) participated in the study. The SCHNOS questionnaire was translated in accordance with international guidelines. The psychometric accuracy of translation was tested in native speakers of Polish. The authors measured the internal consistency, correlatability, and repeatability of the instrument to determine its validity. The data were subjected to statistical analysis.<b>Results:</b> The confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the two-factor structure of the scale. The satisfactory reliability amounted to 0.888 [95% CI: 0.804-0.940] for the SCHNOS-O and 0.883 [95% CI 0.795-0.937] for the SCHNOS-C scale. Differential accuracy was confirmed by AVE values of > 0.5 as well as by correlation of the results with the Rhinoplasty Outcome Evaluation (ROE) questionnaire scores.<b>Conclusions:</b> The SCHNOS questionnaire has been translated, adapted, and validated for use in the Polish-speaking population. The tool was found to be relevant and reliable.

How Much Voicing in Voiced Geminates? The Laryngeal Voicing Profile of Polish Double Stops

Geminates (such as the double /k/ in Polish lekki “light”) form a group of consonants that are mainly characterized by longer durations than the corresponding singletons. Most of the research has concentrated on durational and spectral properties of geminates in contrast to singletons. Much less attention has been paid to the realization of the voicing contrast in geminates and whether it is differently implemented than in singletons. In the current study, we contribute to this research with the data from Polish stop geminates. To this end, a total of 49 native speakers of Polish produced all stop geminates and corresponding singletons in wordforms of the same phonological make-up. The measurements included closure duration, voicing ratio, duration and mean intensity of the release burst. The results showed that the voicing ratio was 0.69, classifying Polish stop geminates as mildly devoiced. There was a significant speaker-dependent variability in that some speakers devoiced all geminates, while others either partially devoiced or never devoiced. The analysis of interactions between geminates and singletons revealed that geminates cancelled voicing cues observed in singletons such as longer durations and lower intensity of the release burst. We discuss the current results in terms of voicing implementation in Polish and in relation to other geminating languages.

Controlling stimulus ambiguity reduces spurious creative ideation variance in a cyclic adaptation of the alternative uses task

In the alternative uses task (AUT), a well-established creativity assessment, participants propose alternative uses for common items (e.g., a brick) within a 2–3 min timeframe. While idea evaluation is likely involved, the emphasis is strongly on idea generation. Here, we test the value of presenting a word overlapping an image compared to a word only prompt, and we introduce a cyclic adaptation of the AUT explicitly calling on participants to choose their best idea. In Experiment 1, as compared to word only, word + image prompts increased idea fluency but reduced idea originality and variability within a group of native Polish speakers. Thus, word + image prompts improve AUT baselining. In Experiment 2, different participants produced as many ideas as possible within two minutes (List) or their single best idea at the end of each of three 30 s ideation cycles (Cycle). Although originality did not differ between List and Cycle overall, the first three ideas in List were rated as less creative than the ideas in Cycle. Overall, we conclude that using disambiguating images reduces spurious interindividual variability in the AUT while introducing idea evaluation in the task allows us to assess creativity beyond idea generation.

What do "klej", "lek" and "kulig" have in common? Polish native speakers’ judgements of phonological similarity between words and nonwords

What do "klej", "lek" and "kulig" have in common? Polish native speakers’ judgements of phonological similarity between words and nonwords

The emotional value of Polish and English subtitles

Abstract Although research on the role of emotion in audiovisual translation and audio description has gained some ground in recent years, the emotional reception of subtitles as an AVT mode has been under researched. To address this empirical gap, this paper presents the results of a study on the emotional rating of English and Polish subtitles to a selection of animated films. Expressions from Polish and English subtitled versions of the same films were collected, and 100 participants (native speakers of Polish and English) were asked to rate them in terms of emotional valence and arousal evoked. While the main effect of utterance type (negatively valenced, neutral, positively valenced) was observed, there was no effect of language, suggesting that the subtitle excerpts elicited similar responses in both languages.

Metaphors of coming out in Polish: A cognitive linguistic approach

Abstract The following qualitative study focuses on the metaphors of coming out in the Polish language. Native Polish speakers were asked to define coming out and then describe their coming out experiences. Data from 94 participants were analysed. The results from the analysis show that, consistently with the previous study on English data (Dyrmo, 2022b), coming out metaphors are based on several different conceptual structures and meaning foci, for example the image schema of FORCE and CONTAINER, the concept of openness and visibility, the domain of MOVEMENT and TRANSFER, the frame of SHARING AN OBJECT and two discursively oriented metaphorical scenarios: COMING OUT IS MAKING YOUR ORIENTATION VISIBLE TO OTHERS and COMING OUT IS SHIFTING A HEAVY OBJECT OFF YOUR SHOULDERS. The present analysis lays ground for further multimodal analyses of coming out metaphors.

Establishing semantic relatedness through ratings, reaction times, and semantic vectors: A database in Polish.

This study presents a Polish semantic priming dataset and semantic similarity ratings for word pairs obtained with native Polish speakers, as well as a range of semantic spaces. The word pairs include strongly related, weakly related, and semantically unrelated word pairs. The rating study (Experiment 1) confirmed that the three conditions differed in semantic relatedness. The semantic priming lexical decision study with a carefully matched subset of the stimuli (Experiment 2), revealed strong semantic priming effects for strongly related word pairs, whereas weakly related word pairs showed a smaller but still significant priming effect relative to semantically unrelated word pairs. The datasets of both experiments and those of SimLex-999 for Polish were then used in a robust semantic model selection from existing and newly trained semantic spaces. This database of semantic vectors, semantic relatedness ratings, and behavioral data collected for all word pairs enable future researchers to benchmark new vectors against this dataset. Furthermore, the new vectors are made freely available for researchers. Although similar semantically strongly and weakly related word pairs are available in other languages, this is the first freely available database for Polish, that combines measures of semantic distance and human data.

Erste Beobachtungen zur Genitivattribuierung in Magisterarbeiten polnischer Germanistikstudierender

The intention of this paper is to present first observations and findings from a study on attributes in academic texts written by students. The present paper analyses the use of genitive attributes in master’s theses written by students of German philology, who are Polish native speakers. The purpose of this study is to identify tendencies in the use of the genitive attribute and its prepositional counterpart in students’ works as well as to indicate some of the potential problems the Polish authors writing in German can have with using these constructions. The analysed collection of data encompasses 250 examples of noun phrases with at least one genitive attribute and 48 examples of phrases with the preposition von gathered from five students’ texts. Because of the limited number of examined texts the results of the analysis should be interpreted with caution and it would be advisable to extend the analysis to more texts in the future. The paper begins by describing the primary syntactic properties of academic texts. Section 3 focuses on the genitive attribute and its counterparts and discusses potential problems these constructions can present to Polish native speakers. The next section presents the results of qualitative analysis of the data. The concluding section 5 sums up the presented study and offers some recommendations for further research.

Processing gender agreement in an additional language: The more languages the better?

Although previous research has observed a facilitative influence of the first language (L1) on the acquisition and processing of gender agreement in a second language (L2), particularly in language pairs with similar gender agreement marking, the question of whether knowledge of two languages with gender can confer an additional advantage for L3/Ln (third or additional language) learners has not yet been addressed. The present study aimed to fill this research gap by examining the processing of gender agreement in intermediate and advanced L3/Ln Swedish among two groups of Polish native speakers: 30 L2 English / L3 Swedish learners, and 30 L2 English / L3 German / L4 Swedish learners. Participants were tested by means of a speeded grammaticality judgment task, in which they judged the correctness of indefinite noun phrases that either agreed or did not agree in gender. They also completed an untimed gender assignment task to control for their lexical knowledge of gender. Accuracy and response time data were submitted to Generalized Linear Models. The analysis shows that L4 Swedish learners process noun phrases faster than L3 Swedish learners, but only at the intermediate proficiency level; however, the groups do not differ in their judgment accuracy. This advantage is interpreted in terms of a surface transfer of similar gender agreement marking, which helps the learners automatize gender agreement processes earlier, but does not increase their sensitivity to gender-agreement violations. Moreover, the results accord with previous L2 studies in showing that learners of Swedish as L3/Ln develop sensitivity to ungrammaticality with advancing proficiency and benefit substantially from their gender assignment knowledge in processing gender agreement. Crucially, the present study provides preliminary evidence of a multilingual advantage in processing morphosyntactic features in L3/Ln.

Polgem – The recorded corpus of Polish geminate consonants

Abstract The report describes the recorded corpus of Polish geminate consonants. It is available at <http://www.prospeech.pl/kategorie/polgem> It contains 111 words with double consonant letters produced by 54 native speakers of Polish, yielding a total of 5994 recorded tokens. The corpus may be used for future research on the production of Polish geminates or for perception experiments with speakers of other geminating or non-geminating languages. The report provides information on the lexical structure of the corpus, recruited speakers and recording specification. It also contains basic statistics of the rate of observed degemination and rearticulation.

Are Second Person Masculine Generics Easier to Process for Men than for Women? Evidence from Polish

In Polish, it is obligatory to mark feminine or masculine grammatical gender on second-person singular past tense verbs (e.g., Dostałaś list ‘You received-F a letter’). When the addressee’s gender is unknown or unspecified, masculine but never feminine gender marking may be used. The present self-paced reading experiment aims to determine whether this practice creates a processing disadvantage for female addressees in such contexts. We further investigated how men process being addressed with feminine-marked verbs, which constitutes a pragmatic violation. To this end, we presented Polish native speakers with short narratives. Each narrative contained either a second-person singular past tense verb with masculine or feminine gender marking, or a gerund verb with no gender marking as a baseline. We hypothesised that both men and women would read the verbs with gender marking mismatching their own gender more slowly than the gender-unmarked gerund verbs. The results revealed that the gender-mismatching verbs were read equally fast as the gerund verbs, and that the verbs with gender marking matching participant gender were read faster. While the relatively high reading time of the gender-unmarked baseline was unexpected, the pattern of results nevertheless shows that verbs with masculine marking were more difficult to process for women compared to men, and vice versa. In conclusion, even though masculine gender marking in the second person is commonly used with a gender-unspecific intention, it created similar processing difficulties for women as the ones that men experienced when addressed through feminine gender marking. This study is the first one, as far as we are aware, to provide evidence for the male bias of second-person masculine generics during language processing.

L2 effects on L1 in foreign language learners: An exploratory study on object pronouns and verb placement in wh-questions in Polish

This study investigates L2 effects on L1 grammar in foreign language learners. As partof a cross-sectional study, 25 Polish native speakers learning English and German, and16 Polish monolingual speakers participated in an acceptability judgment test in Polish The test involved two grammatical phenomena: anaphoric object pronouns which lie at thesyntax-pragmatics interface, and verb placement in wh-questions, which is a propertyof narrow syntax. The analysis shows that multilingual learners accepted overt anaphoricobject pronouns in a sentence-internal position significantly more frequently than monolingual speakers from the control group. Object pronouns in the native language seem to bean element open to the influence of a foreign language, in contrast to linguistic propertieswhich are solely syntactic. This study thus confirms that interface phenomena are moreprone to cross-linguistic influence than purely syntactic features, but it also extends thisthesis to include L2 effect on L1

Zur Aussprache niederländischsprachiger Familiennamen aus dem Bereich des Sports durch polnische Muttersprachler – theoretische Grundlagen und exemplarische Analysen

The aim of the following article is to analyze the pronunciation of Dutch surnames by Polish native speakers. The research material consists of journalistic statements from the communicative-semantic area of sport that are present in public audiovisual mass media. The selected material guarantees the high frequency of its production and the associated perception within the real acts of communication. In particular, the examination includes Dutch sounds which either do not exist in Polish or occur in a different graphical-distributional context. The exemplary research results (the mode of phonetic integration of foreign speech sounds) represent mechanisms that are interpreted in relation to typical communication models. The study also analyzes the potential placement of such phonetic forms in the target language, i.e. Polish.

Conceptualizing translation in Poland in 2018

This paper aims to provide an account of our survey on the semiotic nature of the concept of translation among young Polish native speakers. The methodological strategy adopted is a con­structive replication of Sandra Halverson’s survey conducted in Norway in 1997. We claim, in our main hypothesis (stemming from a theoretical background of prototype semantics, which we used for measuring our object), that the concept of translation is not uniform and includes different semiotic types of translation, some of which are perceived as central (prototypical), and others as peripheral. According to our additional hypothesis, young Polish native speakers have a broad notion of translation (encompassing a wide range of intralingual and intersemiotic translations), even broader than their Norwegian counterparts, more than twenty years ago. Our data has been collected in 2018 using a seven-item questionnaire (seven different text pairs) with a seven-value scale from 103 subjects. While the main hypothesis has been confirmed, the additional hypothesis was rejected, with Polish respondents conceiving the concept of translation more narrowly. The methodological format of a replication produced an ambivalent effect: on the one hand, it yielded positive incentive, and on the other hand, it became our principal hindrance.

Goed gehoord, goed gezegd? Auditieve waarneming van het verschil tussen de Nederlandse [e:] en [ɛi] en de invloed ervan op articulatorische reproductie van de Nederlandse [e:] door Poolse moedertaalsprekers

The paper presents the results of a study on the audition of a Dutch tense vowel [e:] and the diphthong [ɛi] by Polish native speakers. It was hypothesized that Polish native speakers may pronounce the Dutch [e:] as a combination of [ɛ] and [j] because they generally fail to distinguish the [e:] from the diphthong [ɛi], as both sounds lie acoustically close to each other (especially those produced by speakers of Dutch from the Netherlands); moreover, they are absent from the Polish phonetic system. Instead, the experiment has shown that Polish native speakers are very good at differentiating the isolated Dutch [e:] and [ɛi]. It seems that the pronunciation of the Dutch [e:] as a combination of [ɛ] and [j] is rather a matter of articulation than audition, but further experiments are needed to examine the problem.

Moet het nou zo direct? De Poolse en Nederlandse kijk op directheid als communicatief struikelblok

In this contribution, we research what the term directness means to individual native speakers of Polish and Dutch. Within the framework of a larger pilot study on politeness standards in Poland and in the Netherlands, the participants from both countries have been asked to define directness in their own words. We analyze the underlying values (such as social hierarchy or honesty) the respondents wrote about and we seek differences which may lead to misunderstandings in Polish-Dutch communication. The results of this pilot study show that the participants have quite a different view on directness, which is related to social hierarchy and distance.

Metaphors are like lenses: Electrophysiological correlates of novel meaning processing in bilingualism

Aims and objectives: The study provides new insights into how bilingual speakers process semantically complex novel meanings in their native (L1) and non-native language (L2). Methodology: The study employs an EEG method with a semantic decision task to novel nominal metaphors, novel similes, as well as literal and anomalous sentences presented in participants’ L1 and L2. Data and analysis: In total, 29 native speakers of Polish (L1) who were highly proficient in English (L2) took part in the study. The collected EEG signal was analyzed in terms of an event-related potential analysis. The statistical analyses were based on behavioral data (reaction times and accuracy rates) as well as mean amplitudes for the four conditions in the two languages within the N400 and LPC time windows. Findings: The results revealed the N400 effect of utterance type modulated by language nativeness, where the brainwaves for anomalous sentences, novel nominal metaphors, and novel similes converged in L2, while in L1 a graded effect was observed from anomalous sentences to novel nominal metaphors, novel similes and literal sentences. In contrast, within the late time window, a more pronounced sustained negativity to novel nominal metaphors than novel similes was observed in both languages, thus indicating that meaning integration mechanisms might be of similar automaticity in L1 and L2 when bilingual speakers are highly proficient in their L2. Altogether, the present results point to a more taxing mechanisms involved in lexico-semantic access in L2 than L1, yet such an increased effort seems to be resolved within the meaning integration phase. Originality: The findings present novel insights into how bilinguals construct new unfamiliar meanings and show how and when cognitive mechanisms engaged in this process are modulated by language nativeness. Significance: The study might provide crucial implications for further research on bilingual semantic processing as well as human creativity.

Lingua franca features in Italian. Evidence form an evolutionary linguistics experiment

There is no doubt about the lingua franca status of the English language (e.g. Mair 2003). It even manifested itself in an evolutionary linguistics study based on the methodology of iterated learning (cf. Kirby and Hurford 2002). In an experiment with human participants, all of whom were native speakers of Polish, aimed at producing basic yet novel linguistic systems, entrenched linguistic structures related to English could easily be found, despite the fact that the experiment’s participants were asked not to use linguistic units from existing languages (e.g. Rogalska-Chodecka 2015). When the experiment’s participants tried to notice a lexical or syntactic pattern in a set of CVCVCV strings, they referred to English words regardless of their level of language knowledge or the experimenter’s instruction. Consequently, the final product of the experiment was not a novel linguistic system, but one containing entrenched linguistic English-related structures, which proves that in the absence of known linguistic structures, referring to English ones seems to be the easiest option. The present article asks whether it is possible to “force” participants in an experiment to use certain items from the Italian lexicon (related to colour, number, and shape) instead of those that come from English, despite their declared lack of knowledge of the Italian language. The results of two studies, one with a control group where the participants were asked to learn words in English as well as random CVCVCV strings, and one “contaminated” with Italian, where random words were exchanged with Italian ones, are compared in order to determine whether Italian is as useful as English from the perspective of participants in experiments and possesses lingua franca features that can be noticed in the case of the original evolutionary experiment. It turned out that, due to its high learnability, Italian exhibits lingua franca features and, given similar historical conditions to English, could regain its historical lingua franca status.

Praktyka transkrypcji współczesnego języka rosyjskiego na znaki polskiego alfabetu w świetle reguł wydawnictwa naukowego PWN (na podstawie eksperymentu badawczego)

The article discusses the results of a research experiment performed on a group of students at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The students were asked to transcribe Russian texts into the Polish alphabet without any previous training in transcription. The aim of the study was to examine natural inclinations of Polish native speakers in terms of the transcription of the Russian language and to compare the results of the study with the rules of transcription and transliteration used by the Polish Scientific Publishers PWN. Another aim of the study was to confront the obtained data against the outcomes of the analysis of the transcription of Russian texts in the Polish press.

Do all storks fly to Africa? Universal statements and the generic overgeneralization effect

In this paper we examine people's tendency to accept false universal statements such as all storks fly to Africa or all lions have manes as true even though they know such statements are false. Similar outcome studies have sparked two different explanations for this puzzle: the generic overgeneralization effect (Leslie et al., 2011) and the quantifier domain restriction (Lazaridou-Chatzigoga et al., 2019). Following the modified research design by Lazaridou-Chatzigoga et al. (2019), our study aimed to maximally restrict the reported tendency among native Polish speakers by making them adopt an analytical mode of thinking. Contrary to the view held by Lazaridou-Chatzigoga et al., we assumed that the type of context has an impact on the acceptance rates of false universal statements. By controlling three types of contexts: natural, kind-driven/gender-driven, and exception-driven, we showed that this tendency can be attenuated but not eliminated. The paper concludes with a discussion of the assumptions held by two groups of researchers and argues that the generic overgeneralization effect is the only coherent explanation developed so far.