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 or 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.
Negative illusions in Czech speakers
Collaborators: Mojmír Dočekal, Thomas 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 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.
Agreement attraction in Czech, Slovak, and English
Collaborators: Jan Chromý (Charles University), Jakub Dotlačil (Utrecht University), James Brand (Edge Hill University), Anna Laurinavichyute (University of Potsdam)
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, 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 (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), 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 submitted to Language and Cognition.
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 an upcoming book published by LangSci Press.
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
Chromý, J., Lacina, R., Brand, J. L., Vanek, N. (2025). 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.
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.
Návratová, H., Lacinová, L., Pátková Daňsová, P., Lacina, R., Neužilová Michalčáková, R., & Kaňa, Š. (2025). “What makes me uncertain?” Czech mothers' experiences of parenting 13- to 17-month-old toddlers. Family Relations. DOI: 10.1111/fare.13101
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.
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., 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., Sturt, P., & Gotzner, N. (2022) The Comprehension of Broad Focus: Probing Roothian Alternatives. Poster given at CogSci2022, 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/
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.
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.