The effect of grammatical context on processing inflected noun forms in Serbian language

Uvod. Razvijena flektivna morfologija srpskog jezika omogućava morfološko (gramatičko) slaganje različitih vrsta reči koje se realizuje ili pomoću flektivnih sufiksa ili pomoću gramatičkog pravila kojim je određeno slaganje između dve vrste reči. U ovom radu je u okviru pet eksperimenata ispitivan efekat gramatičkog primovanja imenice pridevom (npr. lepoj : kući) /eksperiment 1/, imenice prisvojnom zamenicom (npr. mojoj : kući) /eksperiment 2/, predlogom (npr. na : kući) /eksperiment 3/, imenice predlogom i pridevom (npr. na : lepoj : kući) /eksperiment 4/ i glagola ličnom zamenicom (npr. ti : ideš) /eksperiment 5/. Pitanje efekta gramatičkog primovanja razmatrano je u kontekstu informacionog pristupa obradi flektivne morfologije koji polazi od pretpostavke da je vreme obrade reči sa flektivnim nastavcima determinisano količinom informacije (bit) koju ti oblici nose, a koja je izvedena iz frekvencije i gramatičkog faktora1 (Kostić, A., 1991, 1995; Kostić, A., Marković & Baucal, 2003; Moscosso del Prado Martin, Kostić, A. & Baayen, 2004). Cilj. Ispitati da li je na osnovu količine informacija (bit) moguće izvršiti predikciju vremena reakcije na flektivni oblik reči mete kada joj prethodi određeni gramatički kontekst, kao i na koji način prikazivanje određenog gramatičkog konteksta modifikuje količinu informacije...Introduction. Serbian is highly inflected language characterized by morphological (grammatical) agreement among different parts of speech. The agreement is based either on inflectional suffixes of two open class words (e.g. adjectives/nouns), or is guided by grammatical rule (e.g. preposition/noun). In five experiments presented in this study the effect of grammatical priming of inflected noun and verb forms had been examined. In experiments 1 to 4 inflected noun forms were preceded by inflected adjective /e.g. lepoj : kući/ (experiment 1), inflected possessive pronoun (e.g. mojoj : kući) /experiment 2/, by preposition (e.g. na : kući) /experiment 3/, and both by preposition and inflected adjective (e.g. na : lepoj : kući) /experiment 4/. In experiment 5 personal pronoun preceded inflected verb forms (e.g. ti : ideš). Target words were preceded by congruent, incongruent and neutral prime. The effect of grammatical priming is inspected within the framework of the information-theoretic approach which assumes that processing latency is determined by the amount of information (bit) carried by an inflected word form. The amount of information is derived from inflected form probability and grammatical factor2 (Kostić, A. 1991, 1995; Kostić, A., Marković & Baucal, 2003; Moscosso del Prado Martin, Kostić, A. & Baayen, 2004). Study objective. The aim of this study was to investigate predictive capacity of the information-theoretic approach when an open class word is preceded by grammatically congruent and incongruent context. In addition, the study is aimed at better understanding of the mechanism of grammatical priming, i.e. in which way grammatical context modifies the amount of information carried by an open class target..

Grammatical Gender and Mental Representation of Object: The Case of Musical Instruments

A body of research shows that grammatical gender, although an arbitrary category, is viewed as the system with its own meaning. However, the question remains to what extent does grammatical gender influence shaping our notions about objects when both verbal and visual information are available. Two experiments were conducted. The results obtained in Experiment 1 have shown that grammatical gender as a linguistic property of the pseudo-nouns used as names for musical instruments significantly affects people's representations about these instruments. The purpose of Experiment 2 was to examine how the representation of musical instruments will be shaped in the presence of both language and visual information. The results indicate that the co-existence of linguistic and visual information results in formation of concepts about selected instruments by all available information from both sources, thus suggesting that grammatical gender influences nonverbal concepts' forming, but has no privileged status in the matter