THE COGNITIVE PROCESSING OF DERIVED NOUNS WITH AMBIGUOUS SUFFIXES: BEHAVIORAL AND EYEMOVEMENT STUDY

Abstract

The primary aim of this research has been to investigate whether the suffix ambiguity affects the lexical processing of derived nouns in Serbian. Consequently, in the Experiment 1, the derived nouns were presented isolated to participants in the visual lexical decision task. Bearing in mind that the sentence context was important for the lexical processing, the Experiment 2 was designed as an eye-movement study with the sentences (with derived nouns from the Experiment 1) as stimuli. To the best of our knowledge, the similar experimental study was not performed before in the Serbian language, and therefore this study represents the first attempt to investigate this phenomenon in Serbian. An identical statistical analysis was used to analyze the data collected in both experiments, the Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs). The final results of all GAMMs analyses suggested that the suffixal ambiguity did not affect the lexical processing of derived nouns in Serbian, regardless of whether they were displayed isolated or in the sentence context. The observed results supported the a-morphous perspective in the morpho-lexical processing, as well as the distributed morphology insights from the theoretical linguistics.

Keywords

• a-morphous morphology, derivational and distributed morphology, eye-movement study, lexical processing, suffix ambiguity