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Article published In:
Representation and Processing in Bilingual Morphology
Edited by Jennifer R. Austin
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:1] 2019
► pp. 6–41

A case for agreement

Processing of case inflection by early and late learners

| University of Maryland, College Park
| National Research University Higher School of Economics
| University of Maryland, College Park
Previous research on Russian nominal inflection reports a processing advantage for the Nominative case, the citation form, in native and highly proficient nonnative speakers (Gor, Chrabaszcz, & Cook, 2017). However, it remains unclear whether this advantage is present only in single-word presentation, or it is a fundamental property of lexical storage and access. Moreover, it is unknown whether the processing costs for different cases in native and nonnative word recognition reflect the hierarchical structure of the nominal paradigm where cases have different functional load and type frequency. We report two lexical decision experiments with cross-modal morphosyntactic priming, which compare the processing of case-inflected noun targets preceded by adjective primes with ambiguous oblique-case inflections by native speakers, early (heritage) and late learners of Russian. While all groups showed a processing advantage for the citation form, only native speakers and highly proficient late learners were sensitive to the oblique-case type frequency hierarchy.
Keywords: Russian inflectional morphology, second language, heritage speakers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Nonnative processing of inflected words
    • 1.2Nonnative processing of gender, number, and case agreement and morphosyntactic priming
  • 2.The present study
    • 2.1The Russian case system and the cases used in the study
    • 2.2Predictions for native processing of Russian nouns
    • 2.3Predictions for nonnative processing of Russian nouns
  • 3.Experiment 1
    • 3.1Method
      • 3.1.1Participants
      • 3.1.2Materials
      • 3.1.3Procedure
    • 3.2Results
  • 4.Experiment 2
    • 4.1Method
      • 4.1.1Participants
      • 4.1.2Materials
      • 4.1.3Procedure
    • 4.2Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.16017.gor
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