There are discrepancies in the literature regarding the course of central auditory processes (CAP) maturation in typically developing children and adolescents. The purpose of the study was to provide an overview of age – related improvement in CAP in Polish primary and secondary school students aged 7–16 years. 180 children/adolescents, subdivided into 9 age categories, and 20 adults (aged 18–24 years) performed the Dichotic Digit Test (DDT), Duration Pattern Test (DPT), Frequency Pattern Test (FPT), Gap Detection Test (GDT) and adaptive Speech-in-Noise (aSpN). The 12-year-olds was retested after w week. We found the age effects only for the DDT, DPT and FPT. In the right ear DDT the 7-year-olds performed more poorly than all groups ≥12. In the left ear DDT both 7- and 8-year-olds achieved less correct responses compared with the 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds and with the adults. The right ear advantage was greater in the 7-year-olds than in the 15-year-olds and adult group. At the age of 7 there was lower DPT and FPT scores than in all participants ≥13 whereas the 8-year-olds obtained less correct responses in the FPT than all age categories ≥12. Almost all groups (except for the 7-year-olds) performed better in the DPT than FPT. The test-retest reliability for all tests was satisfactory. The study demonstrated that different CAP have their own patterns of improvement with age and some of them are specific for the Polish population. The psychoacoustic battery may be useful in screening for CAP disorders in Poland.

Pseudowords allow researchers to investigate multiple grammatical or syntactic aspects of language processing. In order to serve that purpose, pseudoword stimuli need to preserve certain properties of real language. We provide a Python-based pipeline for the generation of pseudoword stimuli that sound/read naturally in a given language. The pseudowords are designed to resemble real words and clearly indicate their grammatical class for languages that use specific suffixes from parts of speech. We also provide two sets of pseudonouns and pseudoverbs in Polish that are outcomes of the applied pipeline. The sets are equipped with psycholinguistically relevant properties of words, such as orthographic Levenshtein distance 20. We also performed two studies (overall N = 640) to test the validity of the algorithmically constructed stimuli in a human sample. Thus, we present stimuli that were deprived of direct meaning yet are clearly classifiable as grammatical categories while being orthographically and phonologically plausible.

Recent discoveries suggested that nouns are a word class having the special power to model real-life behavior. In the research by Bryan et al. (2011), participants exposed to the wording being a voter (noun label) were more likely to register and vote than those exposed to the wording voting. In follow-up research (Bryan et al., 2013), a cue don’t be a cheater proved significantly more effective than don’t cheat. However, many attempts to replicate the original results have proven unsuccessful (e.g., Gerber et al., 2016; 2018). To shed light on the effectiveness of subtle linguistic manipulations, we conducted a meta-analysis of 28 experimental studies (N = 13,376), being an exact or conceptual replications of Bryan et al. (2011). Although the average effect of the existing studies was significant (g = 0.12), it was small and the concurrent diagnostics indicated a low trust in the replicability or stability of the effect due to the high probability of publication bias. Based on that, we cannot conclude that the greater effectiveness of nouns as cues has been reliably proven. We discuss future research and theoretical prospects that were uncovered through the meta-analysis of the accumulated data.

Verbs, as the conventional linguistic category for expressing action and motion, possess meta-semantic associations specifically with action-orientation—associations not typically found in other grammatical classes (e.g., nouns). The central aim of this research was to examine whether the proposed association between verbs and action manifests in shorter response times for verbs compared to other grammatical forms. In Studies 1a and 1b ( N _1a = 136, N _{1 b} = 323), we examined the impact of exposure to verbs versus nouns on overall completion time for a complex questionnaire survey. In Studies 2a and 2b ( N _2a = 92, N _2b = 96), we employed a syntactic classification task to investigate behavioral responses to verbs and nouns, using a pseudoword paradigm in which carefully constructed lexical stimuli were devoid of semantic meaning but clearly conveyed grammatical class through suffixes. Across all four experiments, we consistently observed shorter response times for verbs and pseudoverbs compared to nouns and pseudonouns, suggesting that grammatical class exerts meta-semantic effects on behavior.