Papers by Natalia Slioussar
Journal of Slavic linguistics, 2022
Frontiers in psychology, Mar 20, 2024
Introduction: In this paper, we studied how native (L1) speakers of Russian and speakers of Manda... more Introduction: In this paper, we studied how native (L1) speakers of Russian and speakers of Mandarin Chinese learning Russian as a foreign language (L2) process Russian sentences with different word orders. We compared SVO (canonical) and OVS (non-canonical) orders in isolation and in context. Experiments focusing on the L2 processing of different word orders are still not very numerous, and those using context are extremely rare. Methods: In Experiment 1, target sentences were presented in isolation. In Experiment 2, one-sentence contexts introduced one NP mentioned in the target sentence, either the first (so that given information preceded new information, which is characteristic for Russian and many other languages) or the second. As a result, two factors could be compared: the syntactic (word order) and the contextual (whether the context is appropriate from the information-structural perspective). We used different measures to capture online and offline effects: word-byword reading times, question-answering accuracy and sentence rating on a 1 to 5 scale (for L1 participants). Results and discussion: In both experiments, RTs and question-answering accuracy data showed that non-canonical orders were difficult for L2 participants, but not for L1 participants. However, L1 participants gave non-canonical orders lower ratings in isolation, presumably because in naturally occurring texts, they are used only in particular contexts. As for the context factor in Experiment 2, some effects were the same for L1 and L2 processing: all participants read given NPs faster than new ones and preferred sentences with a 'given-new' word order. The latter may reflect the universal principles of narrative coherence. However, unlike native speakers, L2 readers are not sensitive to more subtle contextual requirements of different word orders.
Journal of Slavic linguistics, 2022
Sentence comprehension test for Russian: A tool to assess syntactic competence, 2023
Although all healthy adults have advanced syntactic processing abilities in their native language... more Although all healthy adults have advanced syntactic processing abilities in their native language, psycholinguistic studies report extensive variation among them. However, very few tests were developed to assess this variation, presumably, because when adult native speakers focus on syntactic processing, not being distracted by other tasks, they usually reach ceiling performance. We developed a Sentence Comprehension Test for the Russian language aimed to fill this gap. The test captures variation among participants and does not show ceiling effects. The Sentence Comprehension Test includes 60 unambiguous grammatically complex sentences and 40 control sentences that are of the same length, but are syntactically simpler. Every sentence is accompanied by a comprehension question targeting potential syntactic processing problems and interpretation errors associated with them. Grammatically complex sentences were selected on the basis of the previous literature and then tested in a pilot study. As a result, six constructions that trigger the largest number of errors were identified. For these constructions, we also analyzed which ones are associated with the longest word-by-word reading times, question answering times and the highest error rates. These differences point to different sources of syntactic processing difficulties and can be relied upon in subsequent studies. We conducted two experiments to validate the final version of the test. Getting similar results in two independent experiments, as well as in two presentation modes (reading and listening modes are compared in Experiment 2) confirms its reliability. In Experiment 1, we also showed that the results of the test correlate with the scores in the verbal working memory span test.
Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences eBooks, 2022
Modern psycho-and neurolinguistics use standards of precision typical of the natural sciences. As... more Modern psycho-and neurolinguistics use standards of precision typical of the natural sciences. As verse scholarship also bases its standards on those of the natural sciences, it can be combined fruitfully with the natural sciences, including neuroscience. This may ultimately allow us to answer the fundamental question of how verse and prose are processed in the brain. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of our project that aims to uncover how verse's effects on cognitive processes compare to those of prose. We conducted 3 experiments with 110 informants who were native speakers of Russian between 18 and 55 years old. These experiments had the same design but involved different stimulus texts and groups of informants (40+40+30). Informants are known to slow down their reading considerably if they detect a textual error. Our aim was to compare the reading times for different verse and prose fragments when they contained errors and when they were error-free. We found that errors in verse remain undetected while the same errors are easily perceived in a corresponding prose text. The observation of this phenomenon in all three experiments is important proof of its validity. We suggest that prose and verse differently activate two ways of processing information in the brain: the first way is logical and relies on critical thinking including error detection, while the second is associative and depends on mental imagery rather than sequential logic.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Feb 16, 2017
The author of the article has incorrectly provided the grant number in acknowledgement section of... more The author of the article has incorrectly provided the grant number in acknowledgement section of the original publication.
Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies, Jun 18, 2022
Our paper focuses on the Russian expression svoj. Many authors argue that it should be divided in... more Our paper focuses on the Russian expression svoj. Many authors argue that it should be divided into two lexemes: a reflexive possessive that must be locally bound and an adjective. However, while some cases are clear, the others became a source of controversy. This problem has never been analyzed in a corpus study. In this paper, we examined a corpus sample of the sentences with nominative svoj. We showed that examples with external possessors with u-PPs are the most frequent in this set and analyzed them in more detail. Two types of such constructions with partly different properties are identified. In sum, we concluded that svoj does not occupy the syntactic position of the possessor in the NP and does not express a possessive relation semantically. Rather, it acts as a clause-level adjectival predicate, and its meaning is similar to that of the English different.
Inflectional affixes that walk by themselves: how noun forms are processed in Russian
Exploring the nature of morphological regularity: an fMRI study on Russian
Language, cognition and neuroscience, Jul 18, 2023
Journal of Memory and Language, Aug 1, 2018
Many experiments have studied attraction errors in number agreement (e.g. 'The key to the cabinet... more Many experiments have studied attraction errors in number agreement (e.g. 'The key to the cabinets were rusty'). It has been noted that singular heads with plural dependents (attractors) trigger larger attraction effects than plural heads with singular attractors, and that in languages with morphological case, morphologically ambiguous attractors trigger larger effects (accusative plural forms coinciding with nominative plural were compared to unambiguous case forms). In Russian, the nominative plural forms of some nouns coincide not only with their accusative plural forms but also with the genitive singular. In one production and two comprehension experiments, such genitive singular forms were found to trigger larger attraction effects than morphologically unambiguous genitive plural forms. Accusative plural forms coinciding with the nominative plural were shown to be the most effective attractors. These results have implications for different models of attraction and for other discussions in morphology concerning ambiguity processing, different approaches to syncretism and the problem of lexical insertion.
ExLing Conferences, Dec 1, 2021
In Russian, most nouns denoting professions are historically masculine, but can now be used as co... more In Russian, most nouns denoting professions are historically masculine, but can now be used as common gender: with both masculine and feminine agreement. At the same time, some of these nouns have paired feminine nouns (e.g. zhurnalist 'journalistM/(F)'zhurnalistka 'journalistF'). We investigated for the first time how the availability of such pairs influences the processing of common gender nouns with feminine agreement. We found that online (in a self-paced reading task), this factor does not play a significant role, while stereotypicality (which professions are perceived as stereotypically male or female) does. Offline (in an acceptability judgment task), the situation is the opposite.
Comparison of attraction errors across number and person categories
Russian Converbial Construction: Testing for Coreference and Linear Position
Frontiers in Psychology, Feb 10, 2023
Although all healthy adults have advanced syntactic processing abilities in their native language... more Although all healthy adults have advanced syntactic processing abilities in their native language, psycholinguistic studies report extensive variation among them. However, very few tests were developed to assess this variation, presumably, because when adult native speakers focus on syntactic processing, not being distracted by other tasks, they usually reach ceiling performance. We developed a Sentence Comprehension Test for the Russian language aimed to fill this gap. The test captures variation among participants and does not show ceiling effects. The Sentence Comprehension Test includes 60 unambiguous grammatically complex sentences and 40 control sentences that are of the same length, but are syntactically simpler. Every sentence is accompanied by a comprehension question targeting potential syntactic processing problems and interpretation errors associated with them. Grammatically complex sentences were selected on the basis of the previous literature and then tested in a pilot study. As a result, six constructions that trigger the largest number of errors were identified. For these constructions, we also analyzed which ones are associated with the longest word-byword reading times, question answering times and the highest error rates. These differences point to different sources of syntactic processing difficulties and can be relied upon in subsequent studies. We conducted two experiments to validate the final version of the test. Getting similar results in two independent experiments, as well as in two presentation modes (reading and listening modes are compared in Experiment 2) confirms its reliability. In Experiment 1, we also showed that the results of the test correlate with the scores in the verbal working memory span test.
Frontiers in Psychology, Nov 4, 2016
Agreement attraction errors (such as the number error in the example "The key to the cabinets are... more Agreement attraction errors (such as the number error in the example "The key to the cabinets are rusty") have been the object of many studies in the last 20 years. So far, almost all production experiments and all comprehension experiments looked at binary features (primarily at number in Germanic, Romance, and some other languages, in several cases at gender in Romance languages). Among other things, it was noted that both in production and in comprehension, attraction effects are much stronger for some feature combinations than for the others: they can be observed in the sentences with singular heads and plural dependent nouns (e.g.,"The key to the cabinets..."), but not in the sentences with plural heads and singular dependent nouns (e.g., "The keys to the cabinet..."). Almost all proposed explanations of this asymmetry appeal to feature markedness, but existing findings do not allow teasing different approaches to markedness apart. We report the results of four experiments (one on production and three on comprehension) studying subject-verb gender agreement in Russian, a language with three genders. Firstly, we found attraction effects both in production and in comprehension, but, unlike in the case of number agreement, they were not parallel (in production, feminine gender triggered strongest effects, while neuter triggered weakest effects, while in comprehension, masculine triggered weakest effects). Secondly, in the comprehension experiments attraction was observed for all dependent noun genders, but only for a subset of head noun genders. This goes against the traditional assumption that the features of the dependent noun are crucial for attraction, showing the features of the head are more important. We demonstrate that this approach can be extended to previous findings on attraction and that there exists other evidence for it. In total, these findings let us reconsider the question which properties of features are crucial for agreement attraction in production and in comprehension.
Transposition priming is diminished in the beginning of Russian words
Every adult native speaker of Russian knows that kon' is masculine and lan' is feminine, although... more Every adult native speaker of Russian knows that kon' is masculine and lan' is feminine, although 3 rd declension nouns present some difficulties in the first and second language acquisition. However, will the fact that these nouns are less frequent than masculine nouns ending in a consonant or feminine nouns ending in-a/ja play a role for online subject-predicate agreement processing? Or will subject-predicate agreement processing be more problematic with subjects of a certain gender? Finally, some final consonants are more characteristic for feminine gender, while the others for masculine gender. Are speakers sensitive to this? We present two experiments addressing these questions. We found that all three factors play a role, but for different tasks (online agreement processing or determining the gender of a novel word) and at different processing stages.
Internet data in the study of language change: A case study of alternations in Russian comparatives and a program to work with such data
Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies, Jun 19, 2021
In the present paper, we analyzed a group of Russian nouns denoting professions and social roles.... more In the present paper, we analyzed a group of Russian nouns denoting professions and social roles. Historically, these nouns were masculine; in modern Russian, they can also be used with feminine agreement, but only nominative forms are regarded as normative (e.g. etot / eta vrač 'thisM/F doctor'). We showed that oblique case feminine forms occur naturally using the Web-as-corpus approach and conducted three experimental studies. We discovered that offline rating and online processing of such forms depends on their case. Firstly, this is a unique example of the properties of the form influencing the properties of the lexeme. Secondly, the fact that all oblique forms are regarded as marginal and that locative was found to be significantly worse than other oblique cases points to a deep connection between grammatical gender and inflectional classes and to the crucial role of affix syncretism in morphological processing. This presents a challenge for different approaches in theoretical morphology.
Uploads
Papers by Natalia Slioussar