Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

1.5. Language Processing Research in Croatian
Sentence comprehension studies that use any of the on-line methods are quite rare in
Croatian. In fact, only one study on sentence comprehension in Croatian is available
(Mimica et al., 1994). The study is aimed at establishing cue strength of case markings,
word order and agreement in Croatian using reaction times. A developmental study in the
connectionist framework has been done, as well (Kuvač & Cvikić, in press). It provides a
closer look at Croatian noun morphology defining morphological cues, their strengths
and validity in normal language development. Older studies did not employ on-line
methods. Some of them were inspired with generativist ideas (Fulgosi, 1979) and were
aimed both on explaining processing involved in sentence comprehension and lexical
retrieval. Some of them were crucial for introducing psycholinguistics to Croatian
academic community and for initializing empirical research in language processing by
collecting first spoken language corpus (Stančić & Ljubešić, 1994, Vuletić, 1991).
SLI has been a subject of more thorough research (e.g. Kovačević, Ljubešić, 1997, 1995,
Schöler et al., 1998, Kovačević, 1997, Kovačević et al., 1997), covering many aspects of
the deficit: short-term memory, metalinguistic knowledge, morphology and syntax, etc.
The first research project that was particularly focused on language and not speech
impairments was initiated in the Cabinet for Early Communication of the Center for
Rehabilitation of the Faculty for Special Education and Rehabilitation in Zagreb. Within
this project KIDS (Kent inventory of developing skills) (Reuter et al., 2000) was adopted.
Children with language impairment who enter elementary schools were subject of this
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