Research
Research
What I find fascinating about the human mind and its ability to comprehend language is that it can rapidly integrate a large slew of information from both the sentence itself as well as the context of the utterance in the process of understanding.
Currently, I'm focused on coming to understand the real time establishment of dependencies such as agreement and especially negative dependencies such as NPIs or negative concord. To do this, I make use of grammaticality illusions such as agreement attraction and NPI illusions, which can tell us much about the process by betraying what it is vulnerable to be tempered with. I mostly work on my native Czech, which is a negative concord language, allowing for the study of the processing of a phenomenon on the borderlands of agreement and semantically licensed NPIs.
In my PhD, I aimed to understand what the processes that allow comprehenders to use alternatives in their making sense of utterances are. These include questions about what types of alternatives are activated under what conditions, how they are selected and how they can be linked to people making certain pragmatic inferences. You can read about my results in my dissertation here. TLDR: I found that even in scalar implicatures, comprehenders first activate a slew of associates including weaker alternatives followed by the selection of only the appropriate ones. But also that this might be limited to certain scale types with gradable adjectives showing suggestive evidence that their inferences are not based on lexical alternatives.
This interest in pragmatics has stayed with me and I am now applying it to a new area, namely psychometrics (i.e., the study of psychological measurement), where individual differences in the derivation of pragmatic inferences by comprehenders might interact and interfere with the variables that psychologists are typically interested in measuring my means of questionnaires. See our REVERSED project below for more information.
Chromý, J., Lacina, R., Brand, J. L., Vanek, N. (2026). When the second language attracts but the first does not: A large-scale study of number agreement attraction in Czech learners of English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. DOI: 10.1017/S1366728925100126.
Horovská, R., Lacina, R. & Dočekal, M. (to appear). Distributivity and person constrain reflexives: Experimenting with Czech possessives. Journal of Slavic Linguistics.
Lacina, R., Alexandropoulou, S., Ronai, E., & Gotzner, N. (2026). Scalar alternative activation for implicature processing: A lexical decision study with antonyms and negation. Language and Cognition. DOI: 10.1017/langcog.2026.10060
Lacina, R. & Husband, E. M. (to appear). Grammatical constraints on focus alternatives? The case of gender in Czech. Linguistica Brunensia.
Gotzner, N. & Lacina, R., (2025). Generating and selecting alternatives for scalar implicature computation: The Alternative Activation Account and other theories. Alternatives in Grammar and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-76676-3_2.
Lacina, R. (2025). The negative concord illusion: An acceptability study with Czech neg-words. Linguistics Vanguard. DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2024-0061.
Lacina, R. (2025). The nature of alternatives in the processing of scalar implicatures and focus. Ph.D. dissertation. Universität Osnabrück. DOI: 10.48693/742.
Lacina, R. & Gotzner, N. (2025). Only the (informationally) stronger survive: A probe recognition study with scale-mates and antonyms. Proceedings of Experiments in Linguistic Meaning 3. DOI: 10.3765/elm.3.5796.
Lacina, R.*, Laurinavichyute, A.*, & Chromý, J. (2025). Only case syncretic nouns attract: Czech and Slovak gender agreement. Journal of Memory and Language. DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2025.104623.
Lacina, R. (2025). [Christiansen, Morten H.; Chater, Nick. The language game: how improvisation created language and changed the world]. Book review in Linguistica Brunensia, 73(2), 167-170. DOI: 10.5817/LB2025-41359.
Lacina, R. (2024). Under no illusion: An acceptability study on Czech agreement attraction. Naše řeč (Our Language), 107(3), pp. 119-132. DOI: 10.58756/n31072401.
Lacina, R. & Dotlačil, J. (2024). Grammaticality illusions in Czech: A speeded acceptability study of number agreement attraction. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 46, No. 46). Available here.
Lacina, R. & Gotzner, N. (2024). Exploring scalar diversity through priming: A lexical decision study with adjectives. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 46, No. 46). Available here.
Lacina, R., Sturt, P., & Gotzner, N. (2024). The comprehension of broad focus: Probing alternatives to verb phrases. In Information structure and information theory. Language Science Press. Available here.
Chromý, J., Brand, J. L., Laurinavichyute, A., & Lacina, R., (2023). Number agreement attraction in Czech and English comprehension: A direct experimental comparison. Glossa: Psycholinguistics, 2(1): 14, pp. 1–20. Available here.
Chromý, J., Lacina, R., Dotlačil, J. (2023). Number Agreement Attraction in Czech Comprehension: Negligible Facilitation Effects. Open Mind, 7, pp. 802–836. DOI: 10.1162/opmi_a_00107.
Lacina, R., Šimík, R., & Gotzner, N. (2023). 'Czech' the Alternatives: A Probe Recognition Study of Focus and Word Order. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 27, 365–380. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2023.v27.1075.
Lacina, R. & Chromý, J. (2022). No agreement attraction facilitation observed in Czech: Not even syncretism helps. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Available here.
Lacina, R. & Dočekal, M. (under review). Negation causes NPI and NCI illusions in Czech. Preprint available here.
Chromý, J., Ceháková, M., Lacina, R., & Dotlačil, J. (2026). Task effects in self-paced reading: A methodological study with Czech readers. Talk given at the Annual Conference of the Society for Human Sentence Processing, March 26-28 Cambridge, MA, United States.
Braunerová, L., Lacina, R., & Ziková, M. (2025). (Extra)syllabic consonants in Czech: An experimental study. Talk given at the Olinco conference, June 5 Olomouc, Czech Republic.
Lacina, R., Laurinavichyute, A., Brand, J.L., & Chromý, J. (2024). Gender agreement attraction in Czech and Slovak: The role of syncretism. Talk given at the Formal Descriptions of Slavic Languages 17 conference, November 20 - 22 Brno, Czech Republic.
Horovská, R., Lacina, R., & Dočekal, M. (2024). Reflexives, person constraints and distributivity in Czech: An experimental study. Talk given at the Österreichische Lingvistiktagung, December 19 Innsbruck, Austria.
Horovská, R. & Lacina, R. (2024). Reflexives, person constraints and distributivity in Czech: An experimental study. Talk given at the Biennial of Czech Linguistics conference, September 17 - 20 Prague, Czech Republic.
Lacina, R. (2024). The Negative Concord Illusion: An experiment with Czech neg-words. Talk given at the Biennial of Czech Linguistics conference, September 17 - 20 Prague, Czech Republic.
Lacina, R., Laurinavichyute, A., & Chromý, Jan (2024). You'd better be syncretic! Gender agreement attraction in Czech and Slovak. Talk given at the Psycholinguistics of Slavic Languages 2024 conference, July 9 - 12 Wrocław, Poland.
Lacina, R., Šimík, R., & Gotzner, N. (2022). Comprehending Czech Focus: A Probe Recognition Study of Alternatives. Talk given at the Psycholinguistics of Slavic Languages 2022 conference, July 14 - 16 Tübingen, Germany.
Lacina, R., Sturt, P., & Gotzner, N. (2022). Alternatives in Broad-scope Focus: Testing Rooth's Theory on VP-constituents. Talk given online at the 44th Annual Conference of the German Linguistics Society, February 23 - 25 Tübingen, Germany.
Lacina, R. & Dočekal, M. (2026). Sentential negation causes illusory licensing of both NPIs and NCIs in Czech. Poster given at the Annual Conference of the Society for Human Sentence Processing, March 26-28 Cambridge, MA, United States.
Lacina, R. & Rankin, T. (2026). NPI illusions in the L2 English of Czech and Slovak speakers: A pilot study. Poster given at the Annual Conference of the Society for Human Sentence Processing, March 26-28 Cambridge, MA, United States.
Chodounská, M., & Lacina, R. (2025). Will you (not) pass the salt? Bias in negated questions lowers politeness in Czech. Poster given at the 11th Experimental Pragmatics conference, September 17 -19 Cambridge, UK.
Lacina, R. & Dočekal, M. (2025). Sentential negation causes both NPI and NCI illusions in Czech. Poster given at the 31st Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference, September 4 - 6, Prague, Czech Republic.
Laurinavichyute, A., Lacina, R., & Chromý, J. (2024). You'd better be syncretic! Gender agreement attraction in Czech and Slovak. Poster given at the 30th Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference, September 5 - 7 Edinburgh, UK.
Lacina, R., & Dotlačil, J. (2024). Grammaticality illusions in Czech: A speeded acceptability study of agreement attraction. Poster presented at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, July 24 - 27 Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Lacina, R., & Gotzner, N. (2024). Exploring scalar diversity through priming: A lexical decision study with adjectives. Poster presented at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, July 24 - 27 Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Lacina, R., & Gotzner, N. (2024). Only the (informationally) stronger survive: A probe recognition study with scale-mates and antonyms. Online short talk presented at the Experiments in Linguistic Meaning 3 conference, June 12 Philadelphia, US.
Lacina, R., Alexandropoulou, S., Ronai, E., & Gotzner, N. (2023). The Priming of Informationally Weaker Alternatives: Antonyms and Negation. Poster presented at the 10th Experimental Pragmatics conference, September 20 - 22 Paris, France.
Lacina, R., Alexandropoulou, S., Ronai, E., & Gotzner, N. (2023). Priming Scalar Alternatives under Negation and by Antonyms in Lexical Decision. Poster presented at the 29th Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference, August 31 - September 2 Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain.
Lacina, R., & Dotlačil, J. (2023). Czech number agreement attraction: Modifying attractors with relative clauses. Poster presented at the 29th Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference, August 31 - September 2 Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain.
Lacina, R., Alexandropoulou, S., Ronai, E., & Gotzner, N. (2023). Which alternatives are relevant in scalar implicature processing? A priming study with antonyms and negation. Poster presented at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, July 26 - 29 Sydney, Australia.
Lacina, R., Husband, E.M., & Gotzner, N. (2022). The Representation of Focus Alternatives in Pseudoclefts: A Probe Recognition Study. Pre-registration poster presented at the 9th Experimental Pragmatics Conference, September 22 – 23 Pavia, Italy.
Lacina, R., Šimík, R., & Gotzner, N. (2022). “Czech” the Alternatives: A Probe Recognition Study of Focus and Word Order. Poster presented at the 27th Sinn und Bedeutung Conference, September 14 – 16 Prague, Czech Republic.
Chromý, J., Lacina, R., & Brand, J. (2022). Number agreement attraction in Czech and English: A direct experimental comparison. Poster presented at the 28th Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 2022 Conference, September 7-9, York, UK.
Lacina, R. & Chromý, J. (2022) No agreement attraction facilitation observed in Czech: Not even syncretism helps. Poster given at 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, July 27 - 30, Toronto, Canada.
Lacina, R., Sturt, P., & Gotzner, N. (2022) The Comprehension of Broad Focus: Probing Roothian Alternatives. Poster given at 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, July 27 - 30, Toronto, Canada.
Chromý, J., Lacina, R., & Brand, J. (2022). Number agreement attraction in Czech and English: A direct experimental comparison. Poster given at the Psycholinguistics of Slavic Languages 2022 conference, July 14 - 16 Tübingen, Germany.
Chromý, J., Lacina, R., & Dotlačil, J. (2022). Number-matching attractors fail to facilitate comprehension in Czech. Poster presented at the Psycholinguistics of Slavic Languages 2022 conference, July 14 - 16 Tübingen, Germany.
Chromý, J., Lacina, R., & Dotlačil, J. (2022). Number-matching attractors fail to facilitate comprehension in Czech. Poster presented virtually at the 35th Annual Human Sentence Processing Conference, March 24 – 26 Santa Cruz, CA, USA.
Lacina, R., Šimík, R., & Gotzner, N. (2022). Focus and word order: The representation of alternatives in Czech. Poster presented virtually at the 35th Annual Human Sentence Processing Conference, March 24 – 26 Santa Cruz, CA, USA.
Lacina, R., Sturt, P., & Gotzner, N. (2022). Probing alternatives to focused VP-constituents: A test of the Roothian approach. Poster presented at virtually the 35th Annual Human Sentence Processing Conference, March 24 – 26 Santa Cruz, CA, USA.
Lacina, R., Gotzner, N., & Sturt, P. (2021). Alternatives in Broad-scope Focus: Testing Rooth's Theory on VP-constituents. Short talk given virtually at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 2021, September 2 - 4 Paris, France.
Chromý, J. & Lacina, R. (2021). Number Agreement Attraction in Czech: A Self-paced Reading Study. Short talk given virtually at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 2021, September 2 - 4 Paris, France.
Lacina, R. & Husband, E.M. (2020). Grammatical constraints on focus alternatives? The case of phi-features in Czech. Poster presented virtually at the 33rd Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, March 19 – 21 Amherst, MA, USA. Available at: https://osf.io/e6hgc/
Chromý, J., Ceháková, M., Lacina, R., & Dotlačil, J. (2025). Task effects in self-paced reading: A methodological study with Czech readers. Talk given at the Individual Differences in Reading (IndiREAD) workshop, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Chodounská, M. & Lacina, R. (2025). (Ne)napíšete to na tabuli? Vliv negace na zdvořilost žádostí v češtině [Will you (not) write it on the board? The influence of negation on the politeness of Czech requests]. Talk given at the Žďárek Student Workshop, Charles University, May 24 Prague, Czech Republic.
Lacina, R. (2025). Not as negative as meets the ear: Negation illusions in Czech. Talk given at The Roman Jakobson Linguistic Seminar, Masaryk University, April 3 Brno, Czech Republic.
Lacina, R. (2024). The Negative Concord Illusion: A study with Czech neg-words (+ NPI illusions!). Talk given at Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting, University of Oxford, May 24 Oxford, United Kingdom.
Lacina, R., & Gotzner, N. (2024). Scalar diversity in alternative activation: Lexical decision with adjectives. Talk as a part of the Psycholinguistics Coffee series, University of Edinburgh, April 24 Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Lacina, R., Alexandropoulou, S., Ronai, E., & Gotzner, N. (2023). Priming Scalar Alternatives: Negation and Antonyms. Talk given at Doctoral Students’ Colloquium, Osnabrück University, July 11 Osnabrück, Germany.
Lacina, R., Dotlačil, J., Chromý, J., Laurinavichyute, A., & Brand, J. (2023). Number agreement attraction in Czech (or the lack thereof). Talk given at Colloquium in Sentence Processing, University of Potsdam, July 6 Potsdam, Germany.
Lacina, R., Alexandropoulou, S., Ronai, E., & Gotzner, N. (2023). Priming scalar alternatives. Talk given at Colloquium in Sentence Processing, University of Potsdam, June 28 Potsdam, Germany.
Lacina, R., & Dotlačil, J. (2023). Czech number agreement attraction: Modifying attractors with relative clauses. Talk given at April 2023 meeting of the Friday Primes group. April 28, Berlin, Germany.
Lacina, R. (2022). Focus Alternatives in Processing: Evidence from English and Czech. Talk given at SFB1287’s Pragmatics meeting. August 31 Potsdam, Germany.
Chromý, J., Lacina, R., & Brand, J. (2022). Number agreement attraction in Czech and English: A direct experimental comparison. Talk given at Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning 2022 Workshop, September 12-13, Zürich, Switzerland.
Lacina, R., Šimík, R., & Gotzner, N. (2022). Probing Focus Alternatives in Czech: The Processing of Focus Marked by Word Order. Talk given at Syntax-Semantics Colloquium, May 17 Potsdam, Germany.
Lacina, R., Sturt, P., & Gotzner, N. (2021). Testing Rooth’s Alternative Semantics in Comprehension: Probing Focused VP-constituents. Talk given at Psychosemantics Colloquium, November 15 Potsdam, Germany.
Lacina, R. & Gotzner, N. (2021). The alternative activation theory: A unified account of the processing of focus and implicature?. Online talk given at Scales, degrees and implicature: Novel synergies between semantics and pragmatics, May 26 - 28 Potsdam, Germany.
Lacina, R. & Husband, E.M. (2020). Grammatical constraints on focus alternatives? The case of phi-features in Czech. Poster presented at Focus alternatives: Theoretical and empirical perspectives, February 27 - 28 Berlin, Germany.
Negative illusions in Czech speakers
Collaborators: Mojmír Dočekal, Rhiana Horovská, Tom Rankin (Masaryk University)
Negative polarity items (NPIs) have been found to be susceptible to illusory licensing in comprehension - cases where the NPI, which requires certain specific environments to be licenses, should be ungrammatical, yet is not perceived as such. These linguistic illusions are highly selective and only occur under specific circumstances. Where they do and do not tells us much about how human sentence processing works. The current project aims at studying these illusions in Czech as well as at broadening the scope of investigations to another type of negative item - neg-words or negative concord items (NCIs) that exist in many languages alongside NPIs.
Check out my paper showcasing the negative concord illusion published in Linguistics Vanguard and a preprint with Mojmír Dočekal.
Pragmatic effects in psychometrics
Collaborators: Hynek Cígler, Stanislav Ježek, David Elek (Dept of Psychology, FSS MU), Lukáš Žoha (Dept of Czech Language, MU)
In the recently funded REVERSED project under Dr. Hynek Cígler, we are investigating the so-called polarity effect that is often manifest in psychological questionnaires with reverse-keyed items. These are items that target the same construct as some other item but are often negated and/or antonymic. For instance, the reverse-keyed item to I am happy (with which respondents either agree or disagree) would be either I am not happy or I am unhappy. Current psychometric theory assumes that respondents should simply reverse their answers to these items with any other response considered to be erroneous. The polarity effect then is the appearance of a seemingly phantomous second factor within analyses that seems to be feeding the reverse-keyed items but not their positive versions. In this collaborative project, we aim to test the hypothesis that the polarity effect is due to underlying differences in the pragmatic interpretation of such phenomena as scalars, negation and antonymy that exist between individuals.
Agreement attraction in Czech, Slovak, and English
Collaborators: Jan Chromý (Charles University), Jakub Dotlačil (Utrecht University), James Brand (Edge Hill University), Anna Laurinavichyute (formerly at University of Potsdam), Norbert Vanek (University of Auckland)
Agreement attraction effects in comprehension, mostly facilitatory interference, has been observed in English and in other languages. This project aims to provide a further cross-linguistic test of this effect in Czech and Slovak. We are working on both number and gender agreement attraction in the two languages comparing the size of these effects to those observed in English. We are also examining the role of case syncretism in the modulation of facilitatory interference. Gender attraction effects in production and comprehension are also being investigated. Finally, we are investigating attraction effects in comprehension in Czech L2 speakers of English.
Check out our papers published in the Journal of Memory and Language, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, CogSci 2022, CogSci 2024 , Glossa: Psycholinguistics, and OpenMind.
Politeness, negation and speaker bias in Czech
Collaborators: Michaela Chodounská (University of Potsdam)
Speakers often use linguistic means of making their utterances appear polite in order to shield themselves from unwanted social outcomes or in order to facilitate positive ones. In this research project, we investigate how negation in polar questions influences the perceived politeness of requests in Czech. We use recent findings that show that negation introduces speaker biases (e.g,, epistemic, evidential) and we study how this bias is perceived with regards to the politeness of utterances that express directive speech acts.
Check out out presentation at XPrag2025 in Cambridge, UK.
Scalar alternative activation and representation
Collaborators: Nicole Gotzner (Osnabrück University), Stavroula Alexandropoulou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Eszter Ronai (Northwestern University), Matt Husband (University of Oxford)
Alternatives have been postulated to play a crucial role in scalar implicature derivation. Standard accounts of the phenomenon (e.g. Horn, 1972) place the crux of the process on the negation of a stronger scale-mate by the comprehender. However, recent studies point to a potential role for informationally weaker items on the same scale as well. In this research, we investigate which alternatives are relevant in the process of implicature derivation by using priming methods. We focus especially on adjectival scales (e.g. <warm, hot>) and ask whether (and if so how and when) certain scalar words are primed depending on whether an implicature ought or ought not be computed.
Check out the preprint of our paper on the influence of negation and antonymy on scalar alternative activation published in Language and Cognition and in the proceedings of ELM3.
Have a look at our paper that takes a look at the phenomenon of scalar diversity through the lens of priming in CogSci Proceedings.
Focus alternative representation in Czech
Collaborators: Nicole Gotzner (Osnabrück University), Radek Šimík (Charles University)
Research on the processing of focus has long been conducted mostly on Germanic languages (Gotzner & Spalek, 2019). There is a great need in our building of a theory of the processing of focus to replicate the findings that narrow focus activates a set of contrastive alternatives on different languages. In this project, we aimed to conduct a series of online experiments testing this on Czech. We found preliminary evidence of word order inducing the activation and representation of focus alternatives in Czech.
Check out our paper published in the Proceedings of SuB27.
Alternative representation in broad focus constructions
Collaborators: Nicole Gotzner (Osnabrück University), Patrick Sturt (University of Edinburgh)
It has been found that in processing, narrow focus on nouns can activate semantic associates out of which a selection process creates a set of contextually plausible alternatives (Braun & Tagliapietra, 2010; Husband & Ferreira, 2016). This is consistent with Rooth's (1992) theoretical account. This theory also makes the prediction that alternatives to whole VPs should be activated and selected in cases of broad focus. In a series of probe recognition experiments, we found that effects previously identified in narrow focus do not straightforwardly translate to larger constituents and some evidence in favour of alternatives being represented with differences between nouns and verbs in terms of their interactions with focus particles.
Check out our chapter in book published by LangSci Press.
Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, University of Oxford
Sponsor: E. Matthew Husband
February 2024 – May 2024
Academic Visitor
As an academic visitor at the University of Oxford, I focus on the continuation of the collaboration with Matthew Husband, researching the time-course of the activation of scalar alternatives in language comprehension. I received funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for this stay.
Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences
Supervisor: Filip Smolík
August 2018 – September 2018
Research Assistant Intern
During this internship, I was given a variety of tasks including setting up experimental procedures, corpus work or conducting literature reviews. I was also able to discuss research issues with both junior and senior academics and observe how experiments with young children are conducted.