Processing of inflected nouns and levels of cognitive sensitivity

Abstract

In a series of experiments with lexical decision task it was demonstrated that processing of inflected Serbian noun forms is determined by the amount of information (bits) carried by those forms. The amount of information is derived from form's probability and number of syntactic functions/meanings carried by a form. Form's probability, on the other hand, is specified within gender paradigm (e. g. what is the probability of suffix x to be attached to a feminine noun?) by summing up probabilities of cases shared by a given inflected form. Within a paradigm of feminine nouns, however, there are number of subparadigms that differ in case distribution of their inflected forms and, by the same token, in distribution of the amount of information distribution. Previous studies have shown that the amount of information derived from probabilities of inflected forms derived from the dominant paradigm account for almost all processing variability. In this study we investigate whether processing of inflected forms from the non-dominant paradigm is affected by its probability distribution or by probability distribution of the dominant paradigm. The outcome of the experiment indicated that processing latencies to inflected forms are determined by probabilities derived from the dominant subparadigm.

Keywords

• psycholinguistics
• inflectional morphology
• nouns
• lexical decision