Natalia Slioussar

Processing of a Free Word Order Language: The Role of Syntax and Context

In languages with flexible constituent order (so-called free word order languages), available orders are used to encode given/new distinctions; they therefore differ not only syntactically, but also in their context requirements. In Experiment 1, using a self-paced reading task, we compared Russian S V IO DO (canonical), DO S V IO and DO IO V S constructions in appropriate vs. inappropriate contexts (those that violated their context requirements). The context factor was significant, while the syntax factor was not. The less pronounced context effect evidenced in previous studies (e.g., Kaiser and Trueswell in Cognitioin 94:113–147, 2004) might be due to the use of shorter target sentences and less extensive contexts. We also demonstrated that the slow-down starts at the first contextually inappropriate constituent, which shows that the information about context requirements is taken into account immediately, but that it develops faster on preverbal subjects and postverbal indirect objects (occupying their canonical positions) than on preverbal indirect objects (occupying a noncanonical position, or scrambled). In Experiment 2, these findings were replicated for IO S V DO and IO DO V S orders. S V IO DO orders with a continuation were used to show that there is no additional effect of inappropriate context at the end of the sentence.

An ER-fMRI study of Russian inflectional morphology

The generation of regular and irregular past tense verbs has long been a testing ground for different models of inflection in the mental lexicon. Behavioral studies examined a variety of languages, but neuroimaging studies rely almost exclusively on English and German data. In our fMRI experiment, participants inflected Russian verbs and nouns of different types and corresponding nonce stimuli. Irregular real and nonce verbs activated inferior frontal and inferior parietal regions more than regular verbs did, while no areas were more activated in the opposite comparison. We explain this activation pattern by increasing processing load: a parametric contrast revealed that these regions are also more activated for nonce stimuli compared to real stimuli. A very similar pattern is found for nouns. Unlike most previously obtained results, our findings are more readily compatible with the single-system approach to inflection, which does not postulate a categorical difference between regular and irregular forms.

Changes in functional connectivity within the fronto-temporal brain network induced by regular and irregular Russian verb production

Functional connectivity between brain areas involved in the processing of complex language forms remains largely unexplored. Contributing to the debate about neural mechanisms underlying regular and irregular inflectional morphology processing in the mental lexicon, we conducted an fMRI experiment in which participants generated forms from different types of Russian verbs and nouns as well as from nonce stimuli. The data were subjected to a whole brain voxel-wise analysis of context dependent changes in functional connectivity [the so-called psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis]. Unlike previously reported subtractive results that reveal functional segregation between brain areas, PPI provides complementary information showing how these areas are functionally integrated in a particular task. To date, PPI evidence on inflectional morphology has been scarce and only available for inflectionally impoverished English verbs in a same-different judgment task. Using PPI here in conjunction with a production task in an inflectionally rich language, we found that functional connectivity between the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and bilateral superior temporal gyri (STG) was significantly greater for regular real verbs than for irregular ones. Furthermore, we observed a significant positive covariance between the number of mistakes in irregular real verb trials and the increase in functional connectivity between the LIFG and the right anterior cingulate cortex in these trails, as compared to regular ones. Our results therefore allow for dissociation between regularity and processing difficulty effects. These results, on the one hand, shed new light on the functional interplay within the LIFG-bilateral STG language-related network and, on the other hand, call for partial reconsideration of some of the previous findings while stressing the role of functional temporo-frontal connectivity in complex morphological processes.

Data from Russian Help to Determine in Which Languages the Possible Word Constraint Applies

The Possible Word Constraint, or PWC, is a speech segmentation principle prohibiting to postulate word boundaries if a remaining segment contains only consonants. The PWC was initially formulated for English where all words contain a vowel and claimed to hold universally after being confirmed for various other languages. However, it is crucial to look at languages that allow for words without vowels. Two such languages have been tested: data from Slovak were compatible with the PWC, while data from Tarifiyt Berber did not support it. We hypothesize that the fixed word stress could influence the results in Slovak and report two word-spotting experiments on Russian, which has similar one-consonant words, but flexible word stress. The results contradict the PWC, so we suggest that it does not operate in the languages where words without vowels are possible, while the results from Slovak might be explained by its prosodic properties.

StimulStat: A lexical database for Russian

In this article, we present StimulStat – a lexical database for the Russian language in the form of a web application. The database contains more than 52,000 of the most frequent Russian lemmas and more than 1.7 million word forms derived from them. These lemmas and forms are characterized according to more than 70 properties that were demonstrated to be relevant for psycholinguistic research, including frequency, length, phonological and grammatical properties, orthographic and phonological neighborhood frequency and size, grammatical ambiguity, homonymy and polysemy. Some properties were retrieved from various dictionaries and are presented collectively in a searchable form for the first time, the others were computed specifically for the database. The database can be accessed freely at http://stimul.cognitivestudies.ru.

Gender Agreement Attraction in Russian: Production and Comprehension Evidence

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.