Диссертация (Experimental study of several core concepts of theoretical morphology (on the material of russian) - regularity, syncretism, markedness), страница 2

59Appendix F. Paper “Processing of a free word order language: The role of syntax and discoursecontext” ................................................................................................................................ 73Appendix G. Paper “StimulStat: a lexical database for Russian” ........................................... 7451.

IntroductionThe papers collected in this dissertation are dedicated to the experimental study of inflectionalmorphology. In six papers, we aim to study the relevance of several core morphologicalconcepts for production and processing, including morphological regularity, productivity,feature markedness, different types of syncretism. As a result, we also learn something newabout these concepts, being able to tease apart different approaches to them. This determinesthe theoretical significance of the study.

Thus, the larger goal of the dissertation is to show howtheory and experiment can interact fruitfully.The seventh paper presents a lexical database that contains more than 50 thousand Russianwords with more than 1.7 million word forms characterized for more than 70 differentparameters. It can be used to facilitate stimulus selection for experimental research, whichdetermines the practical significance of the study.

We relied on this database in ourexperimental research, so it was essential to achieve the goals set in the present study.Experimental papers study production and processing of isolated word forms and wordforms in a sentence (primarily on the example of number and gender agreement) and in a widerdiscourse context.

They are presented in more detail in subsequent sections. As we show below,these papers are dedicated to several topics that are a matter of ongoing debate in the field andmake substantial contributions to these discussions, which defines the relevance of the study.It should also be noted that the pool of languages used in experimental morphology is notvery wide so far. All experiments presented in this dissertation were conducted on the materialof Russian. This gave us an opportunity to tease apart several relevant factors and to introducenew questions, which was crucial for our contribution to the debates addressed in thisdissertation.The present study uses behavioral and neuroimaging methods; they are presented insubsequent sections.

The validity of the results is guaranteed by the use of rigorousexperimental design including material selection and experimental procedures. Data analysisalways relies on the appropriate statistical methods.In three papers included in this dissertation, Natalia Slioussar is the only author, in threemore papers, she is the first and/or the corresponding author.

Her contribution to coauthoredpapers can be described as follows. In the papers describing fMRI experiments (Slioussar et al.2014; Kireev et al. 2015), she was responsible for selecting linguistic stimuli, interpreting the6results from the linguistic point of view and to a large extent for writing the papers. In (Slioussarand Malko 2016), both Natalia Slioussar and Anton Malko, her former MA student at SaintPetersburg State University, took part in conducting experiments, analyzing the data andpreparing the draft of paper. However, Natalia Slioussar played the leading role in planning thestudy and interpreting the results, as well as in revising the paper for publication.The work on the StimulStat database was done together with Svetlana Alexeeva, who is thefirst and the corresponding author of the paper (Alexeeva, Slioussar, and Chernova, 2017), andDaria Chernova. Svetlana Alexeeva played a major role in creating and developing thedatabase, Daria Chernova solved many technical problems to make it functional.

NataliaSlioussar was the head of the project responsible for planning and making linguistic decisions(and also the head of the grant from the Russian Foundation for Humanities awarded to theteam to fund the project). She also did most work preparing the paper for publication.The main results of the project can be summarized as follows:(1) Morphologically regular and irregular word forms are processed differently in the brain,and the notion of regularity is associated with the so-called defaultness of the inflectionalclass, rather than with its type frequency or productivity.(2) Different methods of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis revealdifferent aspects of linguistic processing.(3) Case syncretism, not only systematic, but also accidental, plays a major role in productionand processing of agreement attraction errors and therefore in the computation ofgrammatical agreement in general.(4) Feature markedness manifests itself in production and processing of grammaticalagreement.

However, experimental data do not point to a single markedness hierarchy, andsuggest that representational markedness is relevant for production, while frequency-basedhierarchy is relevant for comprehension.(5) Agreement processing is influenced by the prototypicality of inflectional affixes.(6) Word form processing depends on their information structure status and their syntacticposition. Experimental data demonstrate the interplay of these two factors: discoursecontext problems are processed slower for word forms in non-canonical (scrambled)positions.7(7) The lexical database StimulStat with a web interface created for Russian allows searchingfor lemmas and word forms using more than 70 phonologic, orthographic, grammatical andsemantic parameters that were demonstrated to be relevant for experimental studies.

It canbe used in experimental and other linguistic reseach on Russian.2. Production and processing of isolated word formsPapers selected for the defense: (Slioussar et al. 2014; Kireev et al. 2015).Inflectional morphology is at the center of an important debate in cognitive science, concerningthe general principles according to which the mental lexicon is organized and the foundationalproperties of our cognitive architecture. This debate focuses on the distinction betweenmorphologically regular and irregular word forms. The so-called “dual route” approachassumes that the former are generated and processed by symbolic rules, while the latter storedin the lexicon, from where they can be retrieved through associative memory mechanisms (e.g.Clahsen 1999; Marslen-Wilson and Tyler 1997; Orsolini and Marslen-Wilson 1997; Pinker1991, 1999; Pinker and Prince 1988; Ullman 2004). According to the “single route” approach,our cognitive architecture does not rely on symbolic rules and all word forms are computed bya single integrated system (e.g.

MacWhinney and Leinbach 1991; McClelland and Patterson2002; Plunkett and Marchman 1993; Ragnasdóttir et al. 1999; Rumelhart and McClelland1986).Behavioral studies testing DR and SR approaches analyze a variety of languages, butneuroimaging studies rely primarily on English and German data (e.g.

Beretta et al. 2003; deDiego-Balaguer et al. 2006; Desai et al. 2006; Indefrey et al. 1997; Jaeger et al. 1996; Joanisseand Seidenberg 2005; Marslen-Wilson and Tyler 1998; Münte et al. 1999; Newman et al. 2007;Oh et al. 2011; Sach et al. 2004; Sahin et al. 2006; Ullman et al. 1997). Inflectional morphologyin morphologically richer languages like Finnish, Polish and Arabic was examined in a numberof neuroimaging studies, but these studies did not focus on the regular vs.

irregular distinction.This is why we decided to address the problem of regularity in an fMRI study of Russian, alanguage with rich and diverse morphology.The Russian verb system is very complex, and there are several approaches to dividingverbs into inflectional classes. These classes differ in type frequency, and four or five of them(depending on the chosen classification) are productive. The most frequent productive AJ classwas observed to behave as the default class in several previous behavioral studies (Gor and8Chernigovskaya 2001, 2003). Thus, there is no obvious division into regular and irregular verbs,and, if any distinctions between different classes are found, we may be able to explore the natureof regularity and to find out which properties (type frequency, productivity or defaultness) arerelevant for production and processing.In our first experiment, we decided to look at the two poles of the verb class system,comparing verbs from the most frequent and productive AJ class to verbs from smallunproductive classes (we reasoned that if any differences between these two groups were found,we could compare them to other verbs in subsequent studies).

Participants were asked togenerate present tense forms from different visually presented real and nonce verbs and topluralize real and nonce nouns. First we performed a subtractive analysis of the data (Slioussaret al. 2014), then a ROI – whole brain voxel-wise analysis of context dependent changes infunctional connectivity (PPI analysis) (Kireev et al. 2015).We demonstrated that morphological regularity and processing difficulty effects can beteased apart. Activity of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) was greater for production ofirregular verbs (compared to regular ones) and real verbs (compared to nonce ones), so thispattern was explained by processing difficulty (Slioussar et al. 2014).

But the functionalconnectivity of the LIFG with temporal lobe was relatively increased when regular verbs wereproduced (compared to irregular ones). Nothing similar was found for the real/noncedistinction, so this was concluded to be a genuine regularity effect (Kireev et al. 2015).Let us discuss the PPI results in more detail. Firstly, we found that functional connectivitybetween the LIFG and bilaterally distributed clusters in the superior temporal gyri wassignificantly greater in regular real verb trials than in irregular ones.