Слюсарь Наталия Анатольевна

Gender and Declension in Agreement Processing

2020 · CHAPTER · en

Different means to encode IS: how they interact and when they do not

2019 · CHAPTER · en

This abstract summarizes several experiments dedicated to production and comprehension of sentences with different information structure in Russian and in Adyghe.

Morphologically Mediated Effect Of Syntactic Diversity

2019 · CHAPTER · en

In the mental lexicon words are connected to each other through various paths. We explore how a word’s representation might be accessed, depending on its syntactic properties and shared formal properties with other members of a morphological family. Morphological families of verbs in Russian are primarily related through processes of prefixation and suffixation. Based on the changes that these two processes introduce to the derivational paradigm and the base word’s syntactic distribution, we expect to observe a resultant adjustment of the lexical access to the family’s stem. We used the data obtained in two priming studies of morphologically related verbs in Russian. The results account for a facilitative effect of the syntactic variability of a stem verb observed after pre-activation of the suffixed relative, while that of the prefixed verb showed an inhibitory influence.

StimulStat: a lexical database for Russian

2018 · ARTICLE · en

In this article, we present StimulStat – a lexical database for the Russian language in the form of a web appli- cation. 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 char- acterized according to more than 70 properties that were dem- onstrated to be relevant for psycholinguistic research, includ- ing frequency, length, phonological and grammatical proper- ties, 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.

Экспериментальные исследования грамматики: установление анафорических отношений в процессе речепонимания

2018 · ARTICLE · ru

Статья посвящена одной из центральных проблем исследования ментальной грамматики — моду- лярности, которая рассматривается в свете правил установления анафорических отношений. В основу нашего исследования легла модель «Примитивы связывания» Э. Ройланда, согласно которой анафо- рические отношения могут устанавливаться в трех независимо работающих модулях языковой си- стемы: синтаксисе, семантике и дискурсе. Согласно этой модели, обработка информации на разных уровнях происходит последовательно — от наиболее экономичного блока (синтаксиса) к наиболее «дорогому» (дискурсу). Мы провели серию экспериментов, направленную на изучение интерпрета- ции личных местоимений в предложениях, где синтаксический и семантический пути анализа при- водят к разным интерпретациям. Испытуемыми были взрослые здоровые носители русского языка, дети без языковых нарушений 4-5 лет и пациенты с аграмматизмом. Показано, что в случаях, когда в норме анафорические отношения устанавливаются на уровне синтаксиса, дети и пациенты с аграм- матизмом прибегают к семантическому анализу.

Forms and features: the role of syncretism in number agreement attraction

2018 · ARTICLE · en

Many experiments have studied attraction errors in number agreement (e.g. ‘The key to the cabinets were rusty’). It has been noted that singular heads with plural dependents (attractors) trigger larger attraction effects than plural heads with singular attractors, and that in languages with morphological case, morphologically ambiguous attractors trigger larger effects (accusative plural forms coinciding with nominative plural were compared to unambiguous case forms). In Russian, the nominative plural forms of some nouns coincide not only with their accusative plural forms but also with the genitive singular. In one production and two comprehension experiments, such genitive singular forms were found to trigger larger attraction effects than morphologically unambiguous genitive plural forms. Accusative plural forms coinciding with the nominative plural were shown to be the most effective attractors. These results have implications for different models of attraction and for other discussions in morphology concerning ambiguity processing, different approaches to syncretism and the problem of lexical insertion.

Gender, declension and stem-final consonants: an experimental study of gender agreement in Russian

2018 · CHAPTER · en

Every adult native speaker of Russian knows that kon’ is masculine and lan’ is feminine, although 3rd declension nouns present some difficulties in the first and second language acquisition. However, will the fact that these nouns are less frequent than masculine nouns ending in a consonant or feminine nouns ending in -a/ja play a role for online subject-predicate agreement processing? Or will subject-predicate agreement processing be more problematic with subjects of a certain gender? Finally, some final consonants are more characteristic for feminine gender, while the others for masculine gender. Are speakers sensitive to this? We present two experiments addressing these questions. We found that all three factors play a role, but for different tasks (online agreement processing or determining the gender of a novel word) and at different processing stages.

Реорганизация функциональных взаимодействий лобно-височной системы мозга человека в процессе порождения глаголов русского языка

2018 · ARTICLE · ru

На современном этапе развития наук о мозге не вызывает сомнениятот факт, что обеспечениевысших видов деятельности человека обеспечива- ется мозговыми нейрональнымисистемами. В настоящий момент нако- плено много информации относительно функциональной специализации отдельных звеньев таких систем. Однако, как именно работают такие си- стемы, до сих пор остается недостаточно изученным:неизвестными оста- ются закономерности формирования и реорганизации функциональных связей между мозговыми структурами – звеньями нейрональных систем, вовлекаемых в обеспечение текущей целенаправленной деятельности. На- стоящее сообщение посвящено результатам серии исследований,которые позволили установить новые закономерности вовлечения отдельных структур мозга в работу систем обеспечения порождения и восприятия элементов речи.

Organization of functional interactions within the fronto-temporal language brain system underlying production and perception of regular and irregular Russian verbs

2018 · ARTICLE · en

It is largely accepted that the brain system comprising the left inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral areas of the temporal cortex is specifically involved in morphologically complex word processing. Despite a substantial number of experimental neuroimaging studies, the principles of functional organization of this system remain controversial. For instance, a number of studies point to different regimes of involvement of the left IFG and bilateral temporal regions in the processing of regularly or irregularly inflected forms. It is assumed that regular forms are processed using a combinatorial stem-affix rule and that this process is mainly supported by the left IFG and the left superior temporal gyrus (STG). On the other hand, processing of irregular forms is subserved by lexical memory supported by brain areas located in the bilateral STG. Also there is a controversy in the experimental findings demon- strating different directions of changes in the levels of functional activity in the lIFG and STG regions associated with processing of regularly or irregulary inflected forms. Therefore, it is hard to consistently support the claim of differential involvement of this system in the rule or memory-based processing. Since there is a lack of studies dedicated to the investigation of functional interactions within this fronto-temporal brain system it is also hard to infer the principles of its functional organization. To fill this gap we recently conducted two fMRI studies in which healthy participants actively and overtly inflected or passively perceived and actively selected regular and irregular Russian verb forms. Irrespective of the task type, processing of irregular forms was associated with the greater levels of local functional activity in a number of brain regions including the left IFG. In contrast, the analysis of psychophysiological interactions of the lIFG revealed greater connectivity with brain areas located in the STG for both generating and selecting egular verb forms, as compared to irregular ones. Revealed differential relations between the changes in local activity and distant functional interactions can be seen as alterna- tions in the regime of fronto-temporal network activity as a function of morphological process involved.

Differential involvement of prefrontal cortex in the processing of case agreement attraction in Russian: an fMRI study

2018 · ARTICLE · en

Grammatical agreement often becomes the subject of experimen- tal studies: this is one of basic linguistic operations that exhibits interesting cross-linguistic similarities and differences and allows exploring how linguistic dependencies are established and how different features (number, gender, person etc.) are represented and manipulated in the mental grammar. However, most experiments use behavioral methods so far, a number of studies relies on EEG, and neuroimaging experiments are still very infrequent. They revealed a number of facts regarding different functional roles played by the brain areas comprising the frontotemporal language processing brain system: their involvement in semantic or syntactic analysis, in person and number agreement error detection etc. Nineteen healthy right-handed subjects (23±4 years old) partici- pated in the current fMRI study aimed to extend these findings focusing on adjective-noun agreement, which has not been studied before, and on a novel feature: case. Russian has six cases, and adjectives agree with nouns in case, as well as in number and gender (in singular). Grammatically correct sentences as well as sentences with two types of agreement errors were compared: involving or not involving agreement attraction (attraction in subject-predicate number and gender agreement has been extensively studied using behavioral methods and EEG, but not using fMRI). All adjective-noun pairs were introduced by prepositions that unambiguously indicated which case should be used. We found that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG, BA 45/47) and the supplementary motor area were involved in error processing in all conditions (with or without attraction). At the same time, the relative decrease in local activity within the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG, BA 10) was demonstrated for the sentences with attraction errors. The revealed differential involvement of the LIFG and LMFG in the processing of agreement errors supports the domain general role of the LIFG and the language-specific involvement of the LMFG sensitive to morphological features of the form-to-meaning mapping process.