Aleksandar Kostić

Representation of inflected nouns in the internal lexicon.

The lexical representation of Serbo-Croatian nouns was investigated in a lexical decision task. Because Serbo-Croatian nouns are declined, a noun may appear in one of several grammatical cases distinguished by the inflectional morpheme affixed to the base form. The grammatical cases occur with different frequencies, although some are visually and phonetically identical. When the frequencies of identical forms are compounded, the ordering of frequencies is not the same for masculine and feminine genders. These two genders are distinguished further by the fact that the base form for masculine nouns is an actual grammatical case, the nominative singular, whereas the base form for feminine nouns is an abstraction in that it cannot stand alone as an independent word. Exploiting these characteristics of the Serbo-Croatian language, we contrasted three views of how a noun is represented: (1) the independent-entries hypothesis, which assumes an independent representation for each grammatical case, reflecting its frequency of occurrence; (2) the derivational hypothesis, which assumes that only the base morpheme is stored, with the individual cases derived from separately stored inflectional morphemes and rules for combination; and (3) the satellite-entries hypothesis, which assumes that all cases are individually represented, with the nominative singular functioning as the nucleus and the embodiment of the noun’s frequency and around which the other cases cluster uniformly. The evidence strongly favors the satellite-entries hypothesis.

Putting the bits together: an information theoretical perspective on morphological processing

In this study we introduce an information-theoretical formulation of the emergence of type- and token-based effects in morphological processing. We describe a probabilistic measure of the informational complexity of a word, its information residual, which encompasses the combined influences of the amount of information contained by the target word and the amount of information carried by its nested morphological paradigms. By means of re-analyses of previously published data on Dutch words we show that the information residual outperforms the combination of traditional token- and type-based counts in predicting response latencies in visual lexical decision, and at the same time provides a parsimonious account of inflectional, derivational, and compounding processes.

Grammatical priming of inflected nouns.

In normal linguistic usage, the inflected nouns of Sorbo-Croatian are usually preceded by prepositions that help to specify which particular grammatical case is intended and to stress the noun’s function in the sentence. In a lexical decision task, it was demonstrated that lexical decision times to nouns in a grammatical case that demands a preposition were faster when the preposition was appropriate to the case than when it was either inappropriate to the case or a nonsense syllable. This result lends support to the intuition that priming can occur among sentential components.

Type and number of violations and the grammatical congruency effect in lexical decision

SummaryAn experiment was conducted in the Serbo-Croatian language in which native speakers/readers made lexical decisions on inflected nouns and legally inflected pseudonouns following inflected possessive pronouns. A possessive pronoun and the noun or pseudonoun that followed it could agree in case, gender, and number (0 violations), disagree in either case or gender or number (1 violation) or disagree simultaneously on two of the three (2 violations). A grammatical congruency effect was observed for both nouns and pseudonouns. Acceptance latencies were shorter and rejection latencies were longer for inflectional agreement than inflectional disagreement. However, for neither nouns nor pseudonouns was the magnitude of the effect influenced by the type or number of violations. The results are discussed in terms of (1) the automaticity of syntactic processes and (2) the properties of a decision making device (specially tailored to rapid lexical evaluations) relative to the properties of the language processor.

Semantic aspects of morphological processing: Transparency effects in Serbian

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 semantically transparent 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 facilitation were greater overall, but the pattern was similar. The outcome suggests that restricted processing 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.

Informational approach to the processing of inflected morphology: Standard data reconsidered

SummaryThe present paper evaluates the two standard approaches to the processing of inflected morphology (decomposition and the “satellite-entries hypothesis”) in the scope of the results obtained on Serbo-Croatian inflected noun forms. It was demonstrated that the decomposition hypothesis cannot account for most of the results. On the other hand, some of the critical experiments upon which the “satellite-entries” hypothesis was based failed to replicate, and the hypothesis was rejected on empirical grounds. The approach proposed in the present study assumes that processing effects observed with inflected Serbo-Croatian noun forms are based on the subjects sensitivity to the amount of information (i. e., bits) within a particular inflected form. It was demonstrated that the basic unit of the subjects sensitivity is the amount of information derived from the average frequency per syntactic function within a particular inflected form of a noun. This parameter accounts for all the observed processing variability of the inflected Serbo-Croatian noun forms.

Processing differences between nouns, adjectives, and verbs

SummaryProcessing differences were investigated for nouns, adjectives, and verbs in Serbocroatian, a language that depends strongly on inflection to convey grammatical information. Four lexical decision experiments were run. Two of them inspected processing of inflected forms of nouns, demonstrating analogous processing for both singular and plural forms. Processing of the nominative case was faster for both grammatical numbers. Reaction times for the various case forms were not related to their respective frequencies of occurrence. Adjectival processing, on the other hand, gave no privileged role to the nominative case and the inflected form frequency had a strong influence. Similarly, verbs also showed frequency-based processing. An explanation was proposed, suggesting that the organization of inflectional processing is dependent on the number of inflectional alternatives available to a given word.

Semantic similarity influences early morphological priming in Serbian: A challenge to form-then-meaning accounts of word recognition

Semantically similar (e.g., coolant–COOL) primes have produced greater facilitation than have form-similar but semantically dissimilar (e.g., rampant–RAMP) primes when English words have appeared in the forward-masked primed lexical decision task (Feldman, O’Connor, & Moscoso del Prado Martín, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16: 684–691, 2009). These results challenge claims that form-based, semantically blind activation underlies early morphological facilitation. Some have argued that the English materials in previous studies were not ideally constructed, insofar as the types of spelling changes to affixed stems differed in the semantically similar and dissimilar pairs. The present study exploited Serbian’s bialphabetism, rich morphology, and homographic (form-identical) stems to replicate early effects of semantic similarity. Furthermore, it incorporated within-target manipulations of prime type and of alphabet, such that the alphabets of the prime–target pairs matched in Experiment 1a and alternated in Experiment 1b. Importantly, no letter or phoneme changes occurred between the stems of the primes and targets. These results revealed significant effects of semantic similarity that are comparable with and without alphabet alternation. The semantic effects in Serbian replicated almost exactly those in English (Feldman et al., Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16: 684–691, 2009), which suggests that even early in the course of processing, morphemes are units of meaning as well as of form. The results failed to support models of lexical processing that postulate sequential access, first to the morphological form, and then to the semantic aspects of words.

Applicability of Calculated Vitrinite Reflectance for Assessment of Source Rock’s Organic Matter Maturity in Hyperthermal Basins (Banat Depression, Serbia)

Middle and Upper Miocene petroleum source rocks from the Banat Depression, SE Pannonian Basin (Serbia) were investigated. These rocks contain organic matter (OM) in a relatively wide range of maturity (from early to late stage of liquid hydrocarbons generation). OM consists predominantly of Type II kerogen and was deposited under variable redox conditions. This prolific oil and gas production area, as a part of the hyperthermal Pannonain Basin, is characterized by high geothermal gradients (4.0–7.5°C/100 m) and high heating rates (9–22°C/Ma) of the Miocene sediments. Considering complexity of the vitrinite reflection measurements in the source rocks containing Type I and/or Type II kerogen, in this study the values of the measured vitrinite reflectance were compared to calculated vitrinite reflectance, based on maximal palaeotemperature and numerous geochemical maturity parameters. The objective of the study was to assess the applicability of calculated vitrinite reflectance for the Type II kerogen source rocks from a hyperthermal basin. The correlation analysis was performed according to Spearman and Pearson tests. The obtained results showed that calculation of vitrinite reflectance and determination of thermal maturity of OM of the source rocks in hyperthermal basins with high heating rates is best done when based on geochemical parameters calculated from compositions of steranes and methyldibenzothiophenes, and as expected-on maximal palaeotemperature.

Validation of data on polycyclic biomarkers, naphthalenes, phenanthrenes, and alkyldibenzothiophenes obtained by gas chromatographic-mass spectrometric analysis of hydrocarbon concentrates

The possibility of using the data on the hydrocarbon composition obtained by analysis of hydrocarbon concentrates for geochemical studies has been shown on the example of Pannonian Basin (Serbia) crude oils of different genetic types and different degrees of thermal maturity and biodegradation. A high convergence of the values of geochemical parameters calculated on the basis of the composition of steranes and terpanes, alkylnaphthalenes, phenanthrenes, and dibenzothiophenenes in hydrocarbon concentrates and chromatographic fractions isolated from them has been found by correlation analysis.