Short communications

<abstract xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The article discusses the relationships between a sense of alienation and the use of mass media. This discussion was triggered by the idea of the media's significant power in the lives of individuals and their ability to meet fundamental needs. Given the fact that the level of a sense of alienation implies the level of citizens' socio-political activity, defining the role of the media focuses on their importance in the process of building a civil society.</abstract>

The (Dis)alienating Function of the Media. The Role of Mass Media in Building a Civil Society

<abstract xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The purpose of this paper is to compare the earliest stages in the ontogeny of coordinate constructions - both phrasal and sentential - in the development of children acquiring two genetically and structurally related languages, Polish and Bulgarian. The data regarding Polish are excerpted from the speech production of 3 of the children belonging to Szuman's corpus included in CHILDES; the Bulgarian data come from 3 Bulgarian subjects whose language development was traced by the author of this paper. The results show that for both languages, the earliest and most primitive forms of coordination consist of sequences containing two or more NPs with existential semantics. The further acquisition of coordinate constructions displays two lines of development. The first line concerns phrasal coordinate constructions including subject, object and adverbial coordinate phrases, whereas the second line affects the development of sentential coordination. The two developmental lines take their course more or less simultaneously, that is, children produce phrasal coordinate constructions on one hand and two types of sentential coordination on the other: such that can be transformed into phrasal coordinate structures by means of the operation of deletion, and such that cannot, so-called <italic>irreducible</italic> coordinate sentences. Language specificity did not prove to play any important role in the development of coordination in the speech of the Polish and the Bulgarian children. The analyses and discussions emphasize the interplay between children's cognitive, communicative and linguistic development.</abstract>

Precursors of Coordinate Constructions: Polish-Bulgarian Parallels

<abstract xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The aim of the work was to research learning style distribution in Georgian university students to determine which styles or their complexes are optimal in foreign language learning in similar conditions of teaching. Learning style preferences of more and less successful students were compared using a standardized test (Ehrman, 1998). An analysis of frequencies does not reveal reliable differences between more successful and less successful students. A statistically reliable correlation between varieties of styles was detected only in more successful students, giving grounds to conclude that successful students use diverse and multiple styles, while less successful ones are mostly stuck with one style.</abstract>

A Study of Foreign Language Learning Styles Used by Georgian Students

<abstract xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The role of different orthographic units (letters, syllables, words) in reading of orthographically transparent Finnish language was studied by independently manipulating the number of letters (NoL) and syllables (NoS) in words and pseudowords and by recording eye movements during repeated reading aloud of these items. Fluent adult readers showed evidence for using larger orthographic units in (pseudo)word recoding, whereas dysfluent children seem to be stuck in a letter-based decoding strategy, as lexicality and item repetition decreased the NoL effect only among adult readers. The NoS manipulation produced weak repetition effects in both groups. However, dysfluent children showed evidence for word-specific knowledge by making fewer fixations on words than pseudowords; moreover, repetition effects were more noticeable for words than pseudowords, as indexed by shortened average fixation durations on words due to item repetition. The number of fixations was generally reduced by repetition among dysfluent children, suggesting familiarity-based benefits perhaps at the perceptual level of processing.</abstract>

Sublexical Effects on Eye Movements During Repeated Reading of Words and Pseudowords in Finnish

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Volume 18 (2014): Issue 3 (December 2014) Children's Language and Communicative Knowledge, Part Two. In childhood and beyond, Issue Editor: Barbara Bokus

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Psychology of Language and Communication

 eISSN: 2083-8506, pISSN: 1234-2238   Psychology of Language and Communication is an international, peer-reviewed scientific journal committed to publishing high-quality research in the areas of language and communication. We have adhered to the Diamond Open Access standard since our inception in 1997, allowing both the submission of manuscripts and access to full-text articles free of charge.   Psychology of Language and Communication publishes in the Volume Open mode. A new, single Volume Open is initiated at the beginning of each calendar year. Articles accepted for publication are continuously published in the yearly Volume Open, at a rate of about 1-2 articles per month.   We operate under Fair Open Access Principles and CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. We assure the quality of our manuscripts by a thorough assessment by the editorial team and a double-blind peer review process. We follow the COPE publication ethics principles.   Scope   We publish articles on various aspects of psychological studies on language and communication processes in both children and adults. This includes language production and comprehension, the brain's cognitive and social bases of speech, the nature and strategies of various types of discourse, language development, disorders of linguistic and communicative competences, corpus studies, social media communication, psychological text analysis, social perception of spoken and written language, and human-AI communication.   Psychology of Language and Communication integrates previously disparate perspectives and approaches in the psychology of communication into one place, promoting an interdisciplinary perspective on language and communication and providing a forum for researchers from all over the world. We welcome manuscripts representing perspectives in psychology, linguistics, sociology, philosophy, and computer science, provided they align with the journal's central focus. We believe that through these multiple perspectives, we can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the role that language and communication processes play in our world. We welcome original empirical studies (as full-length articles or short reports), replication studies, and reports of null findings. We are also keen to report on methodological advancements in the fields of language and communication research, theoretical papers, and literature reviews.   We are eager to collaborate with students and Early Career Researchers who have conducted solid work but might require additional support and feedback to prepare their work for peer-reviewed publication.   We encourage the proposal of special issues in two ways. First, researchers can suggest calls for papers, act as guest editors, and collaborate with us. Secondly, we invite conference and symposium organizers to contact us in advance regarding the publication of special issues. We are eager to provide an outlet for high-quality, thematically consistent collections of papers following a conference. Possible themes include both novel areas and approaches in the psychology of language and communication as well as overviews and critical reflections on established topics.   Why submit    All submissions undergo a preliminary assessment by a member of the Editorial Board and are then sent out for a thorough evaluation to two or three peer reviewers in a double-blind review process, where the identities of authors and reviewers are kept confidential.   Promotion of each published article.   Fast publishing.   Publishing without charge.    We are indexed in the following databases, among others:    Scopus   DOAJ   PsychINFO   EBSCO    Rejection Rate    80%    Follow us on Twitter - X       Archiving   Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.   For previous issues (1997–2007) go to plc.psychologia.pl/   Plagiarism Policy   The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process.   Co-financing   Psychology of Language and Communication is co-financed by the Polish Ministry of Education and Science (Ministerstwo Edukacji i Nauki) under the program "Rozwój Czasopism Naukowych" (RCN/SP/0485/2021/1).   Obituary Tribute: Ida Kurcz   Obituary Tribute: Jan E. Okuniewski   Obituary Tribute: Grace Wales Shugar 