Ilić, O. & Ković, V.
Department of Psychology. University of Novi Sad. Novi Sad, Serbia.
In this study we investigated thematic vs. taxonomic processing in Serbian language. Thematic relationship refers to a kind of associations which are related in time, space, function or cause, as opposed to taxonomic (or semantic) associations which share similar properties as a group. In an eye-tracking study participants were presented with an auditory cue (e.g. “monkey”), followed by presentation of three visual items. One of the three items was thematically related to the auditory label (e.g. “banana”), another one was taxonomically related (e.g. “giraffe”) and the third item was unrelated to the preceding word (e.g. “bench”). Out of the 24 triads used in the study, participants deliberately chose thematic relationship for the 23 of them. The thematic preference was also evident in the greater number of fixations, and percent of the time spent on the thematically related items. Given that our participants were first year undergraduate students, the level of education or developmental shifts cannot explain the here present preference. We argue that these results call upon a need for some of the thematic-taxonomic explanations to be revisited.