Parafoveal processing of inflectional morphology on Russian nouns

ABSTRACT

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 two-fold. 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Parafoveal processing
• Russian
• eye-movements
• morphological processing

Acknowledgements

We thank Denis Drieghe for his helpful feedback throughout multiple stages of this project: from experimental design to data analyses and interpretation. Last but not least, we thank three anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful and thorough revisions, suggestions, and clarifications.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Anastasia Stoops http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0807-8377

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National Science Foundation [grant number BCS-0847533] to Kiel Christianson.