Natalia Banasik-Jemielniak

The Maria Grzegorzewska University · Institue of Psychology

We explored the topic of irony comprehension by preschoolers. Two hundred and thirty-one children (77 four-year-olds, 89 five-year-olds, and 65 six-year-olds) were tested with the Irony Comprehension Task (ICT, Banasik and Bokus, in: Poster presented at the psycholinguistics conference in Flanders, Berg en Dal, 2012). Participants were asked questi...

Irony is one of the linguistic means in which intended and expressed meaning diverge. It serves social-communicative functions, requires the understanding of the speaker's mental state and its comprehension takes place at an advanced stage of language acquisition. In the present study, we investigated 8-year old’s irony comprehension and social ski...

Children find verbal irony difficult to understand. Yet they need to acquire the skill of comprehending it in order to become proficient communicators and to master deep reading. Graphic novels and comics can expose children to non-literal expressions, including verbal irony. In the paper, I argue that graphic novels and comics may be used as a pow...

including irony (Gibbs 2000). Efficient irony use can serve a wide range of pragmatic goals, while deficits in irony comprehension can have negative social consequences. Whereas a large body of psycholinguistic research has been produced on irony use and understanding by adults, little attention has been paid to the socio-cultural characteristics o...

Online measurement is on the rise in every subdiscipline of the major social sciences, such as psychology, sociology or educational studies. This trend may stem from the numerous advantages offered by this mode of data collection, including the facts that it is cost-efficient and enables the collection of large and diversified samples quickly. Howe...

Abstract: Factors that are often examined in exploring language proficiency in bilingual children are current input, current output, and age of first exposure (Bedore et al., 2012; Mishina-Mori et al., 2011; Hoff et al., 2012). Quantity and quality of language exposure are documented to be crucial factors of language development (Abbot-Smith et al....

We carried out a systematic review of psycholinguistic, empirical, quantitative studies on verbal irony use and individual differences (i.e. psychological, not demographic, traits that significantly differentiate individuals). Out of 5,967 publications screened, 29, comprising 35 studies in total, were included. Following a qualitative content anal...

The aim of the presented research project is to empirically compare the procedures of the Sentence Repetition Task in Polish. The Sentence Repetition Task is designed to study the grammatical development of bilingual children. It has been shown to be a good indicator of language difficulties across languages. When performing the task, the child hea...

We studied views of articles about psychology on 10 language editions of Wikipedia from July 1, 2015, to January 6, 2021. We were most interested in what psychology topics Wikipedia users wanted to read, and how the frequency of views changed during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. Our results show that the topics of interest to people seeking...

While the psychological predictors of antiscience beliefs have been extensively studied, neural underpinnings of the antiscience beliefs have received relatively little interest. The aim of the current study is to investigate whether attitudes towards the scientific issues are reflected in the N400 potential. Thirty-one individuals were asked to ju...

Based on a computational analysis of a large dataset, this study explores if there is a significant longevity effect of intercessory prayer for a named individual’s well-being, if he receives a very high number of prayers per annum for an extended period. We relied on an observational cohort study, based on data from 1988 to 2018, including 857 Rom...

The aim of the study was to explore the impact of peer-reviewed psychology journals on Wikipedia articles. We are presenting a rank of academic journals classified as pertaining to psychology, most cited on Wikipedia, as well as a rank of general-themed academic journals that were most frequently referenced in Wikipedia entries related to psycholog...

Bilingual language development might be characterized by transfer, deceleration, and/or acceleration, the first two being relevant for the language impairment diagnosis. Studies on bilingual children’s productive phonology show evidence of transfer, but little is known about deceleration in this population. Here, we focused on phonological transfer...

The number of children speaking more than one language as well as the number of languages spoken in Ireland has increased significantly posing a problem for timely identification of children with language disorder. The current study aims to profile performance of monolingual and multilingual children on language processing tasks: non-word repetitio...

The aim of the described study was to check how preschool children justify using ironic statements. In the Irony Comprehension Task adopted for examining young children, the participants were asked to explain the use of six examples of verbal irony. There were 231 participants – 77 four-year-olds, 89 five-year-olds and 65 six-year-olds. The data re...

There has been little research conducted on the use of figurative language in parents' input provided by caregivers in child-directed speech during the first four years of the child's life. The aim of the described study was to check (a) how often ironic comments are present in child-directed speech when the interaction takes place between a mother...

BACKGROUND There have been mixed results of the studies checking whether prayers do actually extend the life duration of the people prayed for. Most studies on the topic included a small number of prayers and most of them focused on people already struggling with a medical condition. Intercessory prayer’s influence on health is of scholarly interes...

Most studies on bilingual language development focus on children’s second language (L2). Here, we investigated first language (L1) development of Polish-English early migrant bilinguals in four domains: vocabulary, grammar, phonological processing and discourse. We first compared Polish language skills between bilinguals and their Polish non-migran...

This study investigates verbal irony comprehension by 6-year old bilingual children speaking Polish and English and living in the USA. Researchers have predominantly focused on monolingual populations when examining non-literal language in young children. This is the first exploratory study of how irony is comprehended by children growing up in a b...

The study aims to answer questions about the developmental trajectories of irony comprehension. The research focuses on the problem of the age at which ironic utterances can first be understood. The link between ironic utterance comprehension and early Theory of Mind (ToM) is examined as well. In order to approach the topic, 46 preschool children w...

The paper describes a Polish research project which aims at creating a cognitive and linguistic profile of the Polish-English bilingual child at the school entrance age. With the increase in the number of bilingual children due to economic migrations, researchers, educators and practitioners are often faced with diagnostic dilemmas which arise from...

Based on a broad understanding of issues faced in developing regions of Eastern Europe and Turkey, multiple topics were considered in this exploratory study. Subjects included funding for schools in developing areas, social issues between groups, the improvement of quality education via teacher training, and changes in academic systems. Participant...

Sin lugar a dudas, una parte fundamental de la cultura y cohesión de un pueblo está dada por un lenguaje común, un idioma cargado de significación y que es símbolo de su identidad. En algunas ocasiones es este idioma que une, el que cumple la función de defensa frente a la opresión, creación de una nueva realidad; por decirlo de alguna forma se tra...

Based on a broad understanding of issues faced in developing regions of Eastern Europe and Turkey, multiple topics were considered in this exploratory study. Subjects included funding for schools in developing areas, social issues between groups, the improvement of quality education via teacher training, and changes in academic systems. Participant...