slioussar resume EN (Experimental study of several core concepts of theoretical morphology (on the material of russian) - regularity, syncretism, markedness), страница 4

no gender or declension is intrinsically more difficult to process (at least,in the sentence context). Secondly, declension played a role at a very early stage and its effectwas very short-lived, while the role of gender became visible later and its effect was morepronounced. Namely, agreement errors were noticed significantly later with non-typical 3D-Fnouns than with typical 1D-F or 2D-M ones.

But error-related delay on subsequent words wassignificantly more pronounced for M subjects than for F ones (both 1D and 3D).The latter result suggests that predictions we make about predicate gender are stronger forM subjects. This finding agrees with Slioussar and Malko’s (2016) study presented in theprevious section, as well as with experimental studies of adjectival agreement in Russian(Akhutina et al. 1999, 2001; Romanova and Gor 2017). The former result can be explained bythe fact that 3D-F nouns essentially look like masculine. But an alternative explanation is alsopossible: all agreement errors (in M or in N) may be harder to detect after 3D-F nouns, i.e. theirgender can be in general harder to retrieve.

A follow-up experiment is conducted to tease apartthese two scenarios. Another current experiment looks at non-typical masculine nouns likepapa ‘dad’.3.4. Processing different word ordersPaper selected for the defense: (Slioussar 2011).The paper presented in this section (Slioussar 2011) studies how different word forms areprocessed depending on the word order in the sentence and on its information structure (IS),13i.e.

what information is given or new. Russian has flexible constituent order. Available ordersare used to encode IS, which means that they have different context requirements: for example,an OVS sentence is felicitous when the object is given and the subject is new, but not in zerocontext.However, most experimental studies of flexible constituent order in different languageshave focused on its syntactic properties, ignoring the context factor. Canonical andnoncanonical orders were compared in zero context, and the latter were found to be moredifficult to process (e.g., Bader and Meng, 1999; Erdocia, Laka, Mestres-Misse, and RodriguezFornells, 2009; Frazier and Flores d’Arcais, 1989; Hyönä and Hujanen, 1997; Miyamoto andTakahashi, 2002, 2004; Stojanović, 1999; Vasishth, 2002).

This was explained by the increasedsyntactic complexity of noncanonical orders. But an alternative explanation is also possible:noncanonical orders are infelicitous in zero context, which violates their IS requirements.Context-sensitive studies of scrambling are very rare (Bornkessel and Schlesewsky 2006;Bornkessel et al.

2003; Kaiser and Trueswell 2004).2 Kaiser and Trueswell (2004) comparedFinnish SVO and OVS structures in appropriate and inappropriate contexts. In Finnish, as inmost other free word order languages, the vast majority of narrative sentences have a ‘givennew’ constituent order. So appropriate contexts presupposed such an order in targetconstructions, while inappropriate ones presupposed a ‘new-given’ order — i.e., essentiallyviolating the IS requirements of target sentences. Kaiser and Trueswell showed thatnoncanonical constructions in appropriate contexts were processed faster than those ininappropriate contexts, but were still slower than the canonical order.In our study on Russian (Slioussar 2011), we used the same methodology, but decided totake longer constructions and more extensive context sentences (making two out of threeconstituents in the target sentence given).

In the first self-paced reading experiment, wecompared S V IO DO (canonical), DO S V IO and DO IO V S constructions in appropriate vs.inappropriate contexts. Examples of context sentences are given in (7a-b), examples of targetsentences are given in (8a-b). (7a) was used as appropriate context for (8a) and as inappropriatecontext for (8b) and for another target sentence with the DO S V IO order.(7) a. Na 8 marta Danja Kašin pozdravilMašu Smolinu.on March 8 [D.K.].NOM congratulated [M.S.].ACC2Sekerina (2003) also compared Russian PP S V IO DO PP and PP DO S V IO PP constructions in isolation andin the same context.14(7) b.

Na 8 marta Maša Smolina polučila pljuševogo slonaikonfety.on March 8 [M.S.].NOMreceived [plush elephant].ACC and [candies].ACC(8) a. Danja Kašin podaril Maše Smolinoj pljuševogo slona.S V IO DO[D.K.].NOM gave[M.S.].DAT[plush elephant].ACC(8) b. Pljuševogo slonaMaše Smolinoj podaril Danja Kašin. DO IO V S[plush elephant].ACC [M.S.].DATgave[D.K.].NOMThe context factor was significant, while the syntax factor was not. The less pronounced contexteffect evidenced in (Kaiser and Trueswell 2004) might be due to the use of shorter target andcontext sentences. We also demonstrated that the slow-down starts at the first contextuallyinappropriate constituent, which shows that the information about context requirements is takeninto account immediately, but that it develops faster on preverbal subjects and postverbalindirect objects (occupying their canonical symtactic positions) than on preverbal indirectobjects (occupying a noncanonical position, or scrambled).

In the seconf self-paced readingexperiment, these findings were replicated for IO S V DO and IO DO V S orders. S V IO DOorders with a continuation were used to show that there is no additional effect of inappropriatecontext at the end of the sentence. Thus, processing of word forms in a sentence depends bothon their IS status and syntactic position.4. Creating resources for experimental researchPaper selected for the defense: (Alexeeva, Slioussar, Chernova 2017).Experimental studies identified a large list of word properties that play a role for speechproduction and comprehension. They include lemma and form frequency, word length, thenumber of syllables, stress pattern, whether the word has homonyms, homographs ororthographical neighbors, whether it has multiple senses etc.

Of course, various grammaticalcharacteristics (part of speech, inflectional paradigm etc.) are also important. For severallanguages, databases with search tools were designed to take these properties into accountduring stimulus selection (e.g. Balota et al. 2007; Colheart 1981; Davis 2005; Davis, Perea2005; Duchon et al. 2013; Heister et al. 2011; New et al. 2004).As for Russian, some required characteristics were not represented in electronic dictionariesand databases at all, while the others were scattered across frequency lists, grammatical orexplanatory dictionaries or others resources.

Therefore, we created StimulStat – a lexicaldatabase for Russian in the form of a web application (http://stimul.cognitivestudies.ru). Thedatabase contains more than 50,000 most frequent Russian words (1.7 million word forms).These words and forms are characterized according to more than 70 properties, including15frequency, length, phonological and grammatical properties, orthographic neighbourhoodfrequency and size, homonymy and polysemy. Some properties were retrieved from variousdictionaries and presented collectively in a searchable form for the first time, the others werecomputed specifically for the database. In the paper describing the database (Alexeeva,Slioussar, Chernova 2017) we also present some interesting crosslinguistic differences that canbe identified using such databases.5. ConclusionsExperiments collected in this dissertation study how word forms are produced and processedin isolation and inside sentences on the material of Russian.

Many experiments were the firstor among the first to look at a certain phenomenon (e.g. at the factors of syncretism anddeclension in agreement processing studies, at gender agreement attraction in comprehension)or to apply a particular method (e.g. the PPI method of fMRI data analysis in a linguistic study).The study shows that several notions discussed in theoretical morphology (includingmorphological regularity, markedness, syncretism) are psycholinguistically relevant and thatexperimental data can shed new light on them, demonstrating how theory and experiment caninteract fruitfully.16ReferencesAkhutina, T., Kurgansky, A., Kurganskaya, M., Polinsky, M., Polonskaya, N., Larina, O., Bates, E., Appelbaum,M.

Processing of grammatical gender in normal and aphasic speakers of Russian // Cortex. Vol. 37. 2001. P. 295–326.Akhutina, T., Kurgansky, A., Polinsky, M., Bates, E. Processing of grammatical gender in a three-gender system:Experimental evidence from Russian // Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. Vol. 28. 1999. P. 695–713.Alexeeva, S., Slioussar, N., Chernova, D. StimulStat: a lexical database for Russian // Behavior Research Methods,online first. DOI 10.3758/s13428-017-0994-3.Andonova, E., D’Amico, S., Devescovi, A., Bates, E. Gender and lexical access in Bulgarian // Perception andPsychophysics. Vol. 66.