Parafoveal processing of inflectional morphology on Russian nouns

Vision Research, 2019

The present study investigated whether inflectional morphology on Russian nouns is processed parafoveally during silent reading. The boundary-change paradigm [Rayner, K. (1975). The perceptual span and peripheral cues in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 65-81] was used to examine parafoveal processing of nominal case markings of Russian nouns. The results yielded preview cost for morphologically related preview in gaze duration (vs. an identical baseline) and in total time (TT) (vs. a non-word baseline) and preview benefit in regressions out of the target word. The contribution of the study is twofold. First this is the first demonstration that bound nominal inflectional morphemes are processed parafoveally in a language with linear concatenated morphology (Russian). Second the observed preview effects suggest that parafoveal preview of a morphologically related word was processed fully in the parafovea and interfered with the integration of the target word into the syntactic structure of the sentence.

2012

The experiments in this dissertation investigated the influence of word order and attentional processes (between vs. within words) on the parafoveal processing during reading of inflectional morphology of nouns and verbs in Russian by native speakers and L2 learners via the boundary-change paradigm (Rayner, 1975) and it's modified within-word version (Hyöna, Bertram, and Pollatsek, 2004). Syntactic position of the target word and allocation of attention on the target word affect the time-course of morphological processing in native speakers but not in L2 learners due to increased processing during all stages of word identifications: orthographic, lexical access, and post-lexical integration. iii TABLE OF CONTENT

Reading and Writing - READ WRIT, 1999

This paper reports on an investigation into the morphosyntactic processing of second language (L2) learners who differ in terms of language learning experience. The chief area of interest was the relationship of L2 learning patterns and experience to the acquisition of automatized processing skills in the morphological domain. English- and Russian-native speakers of Hebrew as L2 were assessed on their sensitivity to complex morphological structures which do not exist in their respective native languages (L1). The Hebrew word formation rule which was the focus of investigation was the affixation of prepositions to nouns, resulting in single words which are also full prepositional phrases. In both English and Russian, prepositions and nouns in prepositional phrases must be autonomous. Participants named high frequency words of one (e.g., /parah/ ‘cow’) and three morphemes (e.g., /bakis/ ‘in the pocket’), which were presented in a control condition and also presented in conditions whic...

2013

Many studies discuss how morphological ambiguity influences processing. In particular, it is well known that attraction errors in subject-verb agreement are produced more often and cause smaller delay in comprehension if the form of the intervening noun coincides with the Nominative case form. This is the case in the German example die Stellungnahme gegen die Demonstrationen waren… 'the position against the demonstrations (Acc. Pl=Nom.Pl) were' as opposed to die Stellungnahme zu den Demonstrationen waren… 'the position on the demonstrations (Dat.Pl≠Nom.Pl) were'. However, the explanation of this phenomenon is a matter of debate. How are such errors produced or missed in comprehension, how are ambiguous forms represented so that they can influence this process?.. We offer a novel perspective on this problem by looking at novel data. We conducted two self-paced reading experiments exploring how Russian adjective forms ambiguous for case influence processing of case errors on the following nouns. We compare sentences containing errors like fil'my bez izvestnyh akterah 'movie. NOM.PL without famous. GEN.PL=PREP.PL actor. PREP.PL ' and fil'my bez izvestnyh akteram 'movie. NOM.PL without famous. GEN.PL≠DAT.PL actor. DAT.PL ' to grammatically correct sentences. Errors of the first type are detected later and their effect is less pronounced. The results help answering several questions that arise in connection with attraction errors in subject-verb agreement.

Language and Cognitive Processes, 1999

This study examines the on-line processing of morphological cues to sentence interpretation in Russian and German with the goal of evaluating the relative impacts of cue availability and cue reliability. Both Russian and German use the cues of word order, animacy, case-marking, and subject-verb agreement to identify the agent of active transitive sentences. However, the availability of the case-marking cue is higher in Russian than in German. Using a picture-choice paradigm, we contrasted case-marking and animacy in Russian and German. The reaction times showed larger effects of casemarking in Russian than in German and effects of animacy in German, but not in Russian. These results suggest that the higher the availability of a cue, the larger the processing bene ts associated with the presence of this cue and the smaller the impact of other converging information. A recurrent cascaded backpropagation network was designed to simulate these effects. The network succeeded in capturing the essential language differences in the reaction times, thereby illustrating how the statistical properties of cues in a language can affect the time-course of activation of alternative interpretations during sentence processing.

В статье исследуется, каким образом изменение длины слова в парафовеальной об-ласти (в боковом зрении) влияет на ранние этапы распознавания слов при чтении. Ее цель – установить, важна ли информация о длине только для выбора места следующей фиксации или также на этапе лексического доступа. Результаты эксперимента с при-менением методики невидимой границы при чтении текста носителями русского языка позволяют сделать вывод, что информация о длине слова используется в том числе и для ограничения списка возможных кандидатов при лексическом доступе. Клллевые слова: чтение, движение глаз, парафовеальная обработка, гипотеза огра-ничения лексических кандидатов по длине, длина, методика невидимой границы.

2021

Studies on German and English showed that children and adults can rely on phonological and orthographic information from the parafovea during reading, but this reliance differs between ages and languages. In the present study, we investigated the development of phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian-speaking 8-year-old children, 10-year-old children and adults using gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. The participants read sentences with embedded nouns which were presented in original, pseudohomophone, control for pseudohomophone, transposed-letter and control for transposed-letter conditions in the parafoveal area to assess phonological and orthographic preview benefit effects. The results revealed that 8-year-old children already relied on orthographic information, which was stable in 10-year-old children and adults. The evidence for phonological parafoveal processing was found only in adults, which indicates the development of phonolog...

Brain Research, 2009

The aim of the study was to investigate how the input modality affects the processing of a morphologically complex word. The processing of Finnish inflected vs. monomorphemic words and pseudowords was examined during a lexical decision task, using behavioral responses and event-related potentials. The stimuli were presented in two modalities, visually and auditorily, to two groups of participants. Half of the words and pseudowords carried a case-inflection. At the behavioral level, the inflected words elicited a processing cost with longer decision latencies and higher error rates. At the neural level, pseudowords elicited an N400 effect, which was more pronounced in the visual modality. Inflected words elicited an N400 effect in both modalities, which, however, differed in topography and latency. The N400 effect for inflected words most probably reflects access and possible integration of the stem and suffix. The results suggest that the inflectional processing cost stems from the later, lexical-semantic stage of processing in both modalities. The ERP responses to inflected pseudowords did not differ from the ERP responses to monomorphemic pseudowords in either modality, suggesting that combinatorial caseinflection processing requires a real word stem in order to proceed.

Eye-movement tracking is a method that is increasingly being employed to study reading across different languages. Eye movements provide a window into the underlying cognitive processes and mechanisms while a person is reading . The majority of research investigating eye movements when reading has been conducted on European languages such as English and German and relatively little work has been conducted on other writing systems such as Malay.

Memory & Cognition, 2002

We examined the contribution of semantics to morphological facilitation in the visual lexical decision task at two stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) with Serbian materials. Primes appeared in Roman or Cyrillic characters. Targets always were printed in Roman. When primes were presented at an SOA of 250 msec, decision latencies to verbal targets (e.g., volim) showed greatest facilitation after inflectionally (e.g., vole) related primes, significantly less after semanticallytransparent derived primes (e.g., zavole), and less again after semantically opaque derived primes (e.g., prevole). Latencies after semantically transparent and opaque derived target words did not differ at an SOA of 48 msec. Both were slower than after inflectionally related primes. Stated generally,effects of semantic transparency among derivationally related verb forms were evident at long SOAs, but not at short ones. Under alphabetalternating conditions, magnitudes of facilitationwere greater overall,but the pattern was similar. The outcome suggests that restrictedprocessing time for the prime limits the contribution of semantics to morphological processing and calls into question accounts that posit a task-invariant semantic criterion for morphological decomposition within the lexicon.