Processing of native and nonnative inflected words: Beyond affix stripping

Journal of Memory and Language 93 (2017) 315–332

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Processing of native and nonnative inflected words: Beyond affix stripping Kira Gor a,⇑, Anna Chrabaszcz b, Svetlana Cook c a Graduate Program in Second Language Acquisition, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, 3215 Jiménez Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA b National Research University Higher School of Economics, 21/4 Staraya Basmannaya, Moscow 105066, Russian Federation c University of Maryland, National Foreign Language Center, 5245 Greenbelt Rd, Severn Building 810, College Park, MD 20742, USA

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 5 July 2015 revision received 1 June 2016

Keywords: Inflectional morphology Decomposition Lexical decision task Auditory lexical access Native Nonnative

a b s t r a c t Two auditory lexical decision tasks explore the role of case form (citation or oblique) and the type of inflection (overt or zero). In native speakers, the study reports an additional processing cost for both overtly and zero-inflected oblique-case nouns compared to the same nouns in the citation form. It is interpreted as the cost of checking the recomposed word within the inflectional paradigm rather than the cost of affix stripping, because there is no affix to strip in zero-inflected words. Conversely, nonnative speakers of Russian in Experiment 1 do not show additional processing costs either for case form or inflection type, which suggests that they do not process the morphological information encoded in the inflection. In Experiment 2, we add a new manipulation to the nonword condition such that the nonwords illegally combine real stems and real inflections to emphasize the need for processing the inflection. This time, nonnative speakers show additional processing costs for oblique-case nouns, and their sensitivity to case increases with proficiency, with only high-proficiency nonnative speakers demonstrating native-like sensitivity. We show that citation forms are processed faster than oblique forms regardless of inflection, and that nonnative speakers’ engagement of morphological information is task and proficiencydependent. Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction Decomposition of inflected words There is no agreement on how inflected words are stored in the mental lexicon of native speakers and retrieved in lexical access. At one end of the spectrum, is the full listing position that argues for whole-word storage and access of inflected word forms (Butterworth, 1983). At the opposite end of the spectrum, lies the position that promotes obligatory decomposition of complex words into ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (K. Gor), anna.lukyanchenko@ gmail.com (A. Chrabaszcz), [email protected] (S. Cook). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2016.06.014 0749-596X/Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

constituent morphemes, which is also referred to as affix stripping (Fruchter & Marantz, 2015; Marantz, 2013; Taft, 1979, 2004; Taft & Forster, 1975). A hybrid approach is implemented in a plethora of dual-route models, according to which the processing of complex words can follow one of the two routes: whole-word storage and access, or decomposition, with the choice of the route depending on different conditions, such as lexical frequency and regularity (Baayen, Dijkstra, & Schreuder, 1997; Caramazza, Laudanna, & Romani, 1988; Clahsen, Felser, Neubauer, Sato, & Silva, 2010; Pinker, 1999). We will now briefly review these positions. The idea of whole-word storage and access dispenses with the morphological level of representation in the mental lexicon. Whole-word processing is promoted in the

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network model (Bybee, 1995), and connectionist models of form mappings (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986). Baayen and colleagues claim that there is no need for separate morphological representations or inflectional paradigms, and propose a full-listing model of naïve discriminative learning in visual processing, which replicates several behavioral findings that had been interpreted within a decompositional account (Baayen, Milin, Filipovic´ Ðurdev ic´, Hendrix, & Marelli, 2011). This claim has been questioned given that the morphological level is covertly embedded in the semantic level of the model (see Marantz, 2013 for a discussion).1 The full-listing approach that does not leave any role for morphological structure in lexical representations cannot explain the numerous data showing the effect of morphological priming (e.g., Clahsen et al., 2010; Feldman, Kostic´, Basnight-Brown, Filipovic´ Ður devic´, & Pastizzo, 2010; Gor & Cook, 2010; Gor & Jackson, 2013). The morphological priming effect is believed to result from the reactivation of the same stem, and repeated access to the stem is made possible due to morphological decomposition. Support for full listing should come from surface frequency effects on reaction times in a lexical decision task, i.e., faster responses for words with higher surface frequency, regardless of words’ morphological structure. In fact, the opposite has been found, namely, that polymorphemic words matched on surface frequency and other lexical parameters with monomorphemic words show additional processing costs (Lehtonen & Laine, 2003). These results present a challenge to the account based on the idea of whole-word storage and access of morphologically complex words. In contrast to the whole-word storage and access position, the fully decompositional position proposes that all morphologically complex and transparent words are decomposed in lexical access (Taft, 2004). Inflected words are structually transparent because inflections have clear meanings, e.g., the verbal -ed affix that signals past tense. Derivations are generally less transparent than inflections; however, they can range in transparency from more transparent to opaque. Derivations are considered transparent if the meaning of the derived word is compositional and can be inferred from the meanings of the stem and derivational affix, e.g., work and -er, a derivational suffix meaning ‘doer’, form worker, ‘a person who works’. Conversely, department is opaque, since it is unclear how its meaning can be derived from its constituents, depart and -ment. According to Taft, while less transparent derivations are stored in the mental lexicon both as a whole word and its constituents, and are accessed through the constituents, fully transparent inflected words do not have whole-word representations. The dual-route approach presupposes the type of storage where the word is represented both as a whole and

1 Note, however, that the model was developed for visual processing, and may not be fully applicable to auditory lexical access examined in the present study. This is due to the fact that auditory signals are processed as they unfold in time, and the Russian inflected nouns in the study invariably begin with the stem and have inflectional endings. In visual processing, when the entire word is available, it is conceivable that the processing begins with the stem and inflection at the same time.

as all its constituent morphemes (Crepaldi, Rastle, Coltheart, & Nickels, 2010; Gor & Jackson, 2013). The hybrid models combining whole-word and morphemebased storage differ in their position regarding the choice of the route for individual words depending on their properties. Lexical frequency is the leading factor that defines the choice of the route, with decomposition applied to low-frequency inflected words, and whole-word storage and retrieval to high-frequency words (Lehtonen & Laine, 2003). The race model with competition to death (Baayen et al., 1997) hypothesizes parallel activation of both decompositional and whole-word routes, with the fastest one winning the race. Conversely, the augmented addressed morphology (AAM) model (Caramazza et al., 1988) postulates that the whole-word route is always used for the existing lexical entries that have an address in the mental lexicon, while the decompositional route is available for new entries (including nonwords). Another version of the dual-system approach that is based on the distinction between regular and irregular morphology claims that regularly inflected words are stored decomposed, while irregularly inflected ones are stored as whole words (Clahsen et al., 2010; Pinker, 1999). Finally, the two types of affixation, inflection and derivation, may be differently represented and processed (Clahsen, 2006; Wunderlich, 1996), with neurolinguistic evidence generally supporting this point of view (Bozic, Tyler, Su, Wingfield, & MarslenWilson, 2013). Despite the fact that the dual-route approach is heterogeneous, all these hybrid models acknowledge that both routes—morphological decomposition and whole-word storage—are potentially available in lexical access; however, each model constrains their use in its own way. The current paper focuses on regularly inflected words that are believed to be processed by decomposition according to the decompositional view and several hybrid models mentioned above. The time course of access and retrieval of inflected words The decompositional view represented in the Full Decomposition model maintains that decomposition proceeds in several stages, including affix stripping, access of the stem, recombination of the stem and inflection, checking of the entire word form, and processing of the morphosyntactic information (Taft, 2004). Recent support for the Full Decomposition model in visual lexical access, and, specifically, for the sequencing of the processing stages, comes from a functional neuroimaging magnetoencephalography (MEG) study that provides evidence for stem lookup followed by recombination (Fruchter & Marantz, 2015). On the Full Decomposition view, played is stripped of the affix -ed, the stem play is accessed for lexical meaning, the stem and affix are recombined, and the whole word is checked for the combined lexical and morphosyntactic features, i.e., played is interpreted as the past tense of the verb denoting the activity of ‘playing’. Importantly, the term decomposition can be understood in two senses. In its broader sense, it encompasses all the stages of morphological processing involved in lexical access— from decomposition to recombination and checking. In its narrow literal sense, it refers only to the actual initial

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decomposition, or affix stripping. While the processing costs may potentially emerge at any stage of morphological decomposition, this study is concerned with the processing costs incurred during recombination and checking. Early decomposition in the visual domain, or morphoorthographic decomposition observed in masked priming experiments, is believed to be automatic and even blind to the actual morphological structure (Rastle & Davis, 2008; Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004). Thus, in masked priming, corner primes corn (even though corner cannot be morphologically decomposed into corn and -er) due to the first incorrect reaction to -er as a potential morpheme. There are similar claims about the automaticity and blindness of decomposition of inflected words in the auditory domain, which are based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data for English verbs with the past-tense -ed inflection, and even nouns with pseudoinflections, such as trade (a pseudo past-tense inflected tray) (Bozic, Tyler, Ives, Randall, & Marslen-Wilson, 2010). If early morphological decomposition, or affix stripping, is fast, automatic, and even blind to the actual morphological structure, it should not be sensitive to the properties of the inflected word, such as its place in the inflectional paradigm. Accordingly, one can expect the stages of recombination and checking to be responsible for the differences in response latencies for different forms in the paradigm. And indeed, two lines of inquiry suggest that the processing costs associated with lexical access of inflected words are incurred at the later recombination stage. Taft (2004) has manipulated the structure of nonwords in a way that in one version of the visual lexical decision task (LDT) nonwords had nonce stems, e.g., girped, and in the other—real stems illegally combined with real inflections, e.g., islanded. In the latter version, participants needed to increase their focus on the recombination stage, and this has increased the processing costs for low-frequency stem-inflection mappings, such as in moons where the base form moon is usually used without the plural affix. The second indication comes from neurolinguistic research, which suggests that the inflectional processing costs are associated with the late semantic–syntactic integration stage (referred to as the recombination and checking stage in the present study). For example, two fMRI studies (Lehtonen, Vorobyev, Hugdahl, Tuokkola, & Laine, 2006; Lehtonen et al., 2009) and an event-related potentials (ERP) study using a visual LDT paradigm with Finnish monomorphemic and polymorphemic inflected words (Lehtonen et al., 2007) support the late semanticsyntactic locus of morphological processing costs in Finnish. One way to measure the processing costs incurred at the recombination and/or checking stage of lexical access is to make use of zero-inflected word forms where there is no overt affix to strip, but checking is still needed.2 Zero affixes have recently attracted researchers’ attention

2 For zero-inflected forms, surface affix stripping and recombination are absent. We will further refer to recombination and checking with the understanding that for zero-inflected words, recombination will refer to abstract structural representations, and will not involve surface affixes, while checking will proceed in the same way as for overtly inflected words.

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(Pliatsikas, Wheeldon, Lahiri, & Hansen, 2014). An fMRI study targeting English zero-derived words in a visual LDT found increased activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), the brain area which is believed to be responsible for morphological decomposition or for derivational complexity that does not have surface manifestations, as in bridge-N > bridge-V. The stimuli were constructed in such a way that they all had the same surface structure, with an ing affix, and in this sense, were all derived. However, some words were formed by one-step derivation, as in soakV > soaking, while others by two-step derivation, as in bridge-N > bridge-V > bridging (with one additional step— noun to verb derivation that does not have a surface manifestation, and that the authors refer to as a zero derivation). Critically, derivational complexity, as measured by the number of derivational steps, was covert. Given that two-step derivations led to an increase in brain activity compared to one-step derivations, the study argues that morphological processing goes beyond surface morphological decomposition, but rather involves the covert structural level. This line of reasoning provides the basis for the present behavioral study comparing native and nonnative processing of zero-inflected nouns in Russian. If, indeed, zero inflection, similarly to zero derivation, requires structural processing, then the processing costs will be present despite the fact that there is no need for affix stripping because the overt inflection is absent. The Slavic nominal paradigm offers a unique opportunity to explore the processing mechanisms in zeroinfected nouns. A series of fMRI studies (Bozic et al., 2010; Bozic, Szlachta, & Marslen-Wilson, 2013; Bozic, Tyler, et al., 2013; Szlachta, Bozic, Jelowicka, & MarslenWilson, 2012) has revealed a difference in how zeroinflected nouns are processed (and presumably, represented) in native speakers of English and Polish. English simple monomorphemic uninflected nouns presented in the auditory modality showed activation in the bilateral distributed system that supports general language comprehension, while inflected nouns showed activation in the left fronto-temporal system selectively tuned to the processing of combinatorial grammatical sequences, such as past-tense inflection (Bozic et al., 2010; Bozic, Szlachta, et al., 2013; Bozic, Tyler, et al., 2013). Conversely, in a parallel fMRI study with auditory stimuli, Polish nouns engaged the left fronto-temporal system regardless of whether they were overtly case-inflected or not (Szlachta et al., 2012). Szlachta and colleagues interpreted this finding as a manifestation of cross-linguistic differences in English and Polish inflectional morphology. Whereas English nouns and verbs have very few inflected forms and the base form always happens to be the citation form, Polish nouns have overt or zero inflections depending on gender and case, and therefore, zero (also called null) inflections represent a particular type of inflection rather than the absence of inflection. A similar situation occurs in several other Slavic languages, including Russian, the target language in this study, where many nouns in the Nominative case differ by the presence or absence of an overt inflection. The study on Polish (Szlachta et al., 2012) did not include zero-inflected nouns in oblique cases, and there-

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fore, the case status (the Nominative versus oblique cases) and the inflection type (overt and zero) were confounded: zero-inflected nouns only appeared in the Nominative case, while all overtly inflected nouns were in oblique cases. Also, Szlachta and colleagues used a passive listening paradigm with a nonlinguistic task intended to assure that listeners indeed attended to the stimuli, while no behavioral data are available for direct comparisons. Russian nominal inflection makes it possible to disentangle the case form (citation versus oblique) and inflection type (overt versus zero) by comparing the processing costs for zero-inflected nouns in the Nominative and an oblique case, the Genitive plural, with the processing costs for case-inflected forms with overt inflections. Ultimately, a comparison of nouns with zero and overt inflections makes it possible to isolate the processing costs associated with affix stripping as opposed to recombination and checking. Indeed, in the absence of an actual affix to strip, any processing costs will be associated with processes other than affix stripping. Is there morphological decomposition in L2? Nonnative morphological processing has recently attracted researchers’ attention (Babcock, Stowe, Maloof, Brovetto, & Ullman, 2012; Basnight-Brown, Chen, Hua, Kostic´, & Feldman, 2007; Clahsen, Balkhair, Schutter, & Cunnings, 2013; Clahsen et al., 2010; Coughlin & Tremblay, 2014; Diependaele, Duñabeitia, Morris, & Keuleers, 2011; Feldman et al., 2010; Foote, 2015; Gor & Cook, 2010; Gor & Jackson, 2013; Jacob, Fleischhauer, & Clahsen, 2013; Kirkici & Clahsen, 2012; Portin, Lehtonen, & Laine, 2007; Portin et al., 2008; Vainio, Pajunen, & Huönä, 2014); however, many aspects of it remain largely unexplored. The issue of whether nonnative, or second language (L2), speakers decompose inflected words or store and access them undecomposed has become one of the most debated ones in second language acquisition research. According to the shallow-structure hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006) that was extended to the specific situation of morphological processing (Clahsen et al., 2010), L2 speakers access regularly inflected words undecomposed. This position postulating whole-word storage and retrieval in L2 is also expressed in the declarative/procedural model (Ullman, 2001, 2012), which additionally argues for a shift in the processing mode, from whole-word processing to morphological decomposition at a point when L2 speakers reach a sufficiently high proficiency. Empirical evidence in favor of whole-word storage in nonnative speakers comes from the studies that use a masked priming method and find no or significantly reduced priming for regular inflectional morphology in nonnative speakers. For example, Neubauer and Clahsen (2009) examined masked priming effects for German regular and irregular participles with native and nonnative (L1 Polish) speakers of German, and observed a partial priming for irregular participles in both groups, but significant group differences in the regular condition: L1 speakers showed full priming, while L2 speakers showed no priming at all (see also Clahsen et al., 2010). In another study, Silva and Clahsen (2008) observed no masked priming effects for regularly inflected

English past-tense verbs in late L2 speakers with German, Chinese, and Japanese as L1, while English native speakers showed full priming (see, however, a replication study by Voga, Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, and Giraudo (2014) that used the design and materials of Silva and Clahsen and found a facilitation for English regular past-tense verbal morphology in Greek learners of English). Another study by Jacob et al. (2013) found full priming for regularly inflected German -t participles in German native speakers, with only partial priming in nonnative speakers (L1 Russian) with advanced German proficiency. The authors stipulate a possibility that nonnative participants’ processing of the prime is already vulnerable due to nonnative slowness and inefficiency, and that is why it may be negatively affected by a massive use of unrelated trials in their study. Note that Neubauer and Clahsen (2009), and Silva and Clahsen (2008) also used a great number of filler trials with nonword primes compared to the related trials in their respective studies.3 An alternative view on nonnative morphological processing maintains that L2 speakers decompose morphologically complex words in lexical access (Basnight-Brown et al., 2007; Coughlin & Tremblay, 2014; Feldman et al., 2010; Foote, 2015; Gor & Cook, 2010; Gor & Jackson, 2013; Voga et al., 2014). At the same time, the efficiency of nonnative decomposition is mitigated by morphological complexity and the properties of the allomorphy of inflected words (Gor & Cook, 2010; Gor & Jackson, 2013). Evidence favoring nonnative decomposition is reported in the study by Basnight-Brown et al. (2007). They used a cross-modal priming paradigm to obtain priming effects for regularly inflected English -ed verbs in L2 participants, whose native language was Serbian or Chinese. In another study with masked and cross-modal priming tasks, the priming effects for English irregular verbs were found to be mitigated by their phonological form and L1 background of the participants, e.g., nested verbs such as drawn-DRAW showed facilitation in Serbian, but not Chinese participants, while verbs with a stem change, such as ran-RUN, did not show facilitation in either L2 group (Feldman et al., 2010). In yet another two studies, English-speaking learners of Russian showed robust auditory priming for regularly inflected Russian verbs (Gor & Cook, 2010; Gor & Jackson, 2013). L2 proficiency interacted with the degree of regularity, which was operationalized as the complexity and transparency in stem allomorphy. The higher the L2 proficiency in Russian was, the more facilita3 Importantly, the claim that L2 speakers do not decompose inflected words while native (L1) speakers do, implies that L2 speakers store more inflected words than L1 speakers. This is at odds with the fact that L2 speakers receive reduced input compared to L1 speakers, and as a result, are less exposed to all the low-frequency inflected forms of the word in inflectionally rich languages (Crossley, Salsbury, & McNamara, 2012; see also Gor, 2010; Gor & Jackson, 2013). This observation warrants a question: How do L2 speakers access the lexical meaning of low-frequency forms in the inflectional paradigm? For example, beginning L2 learners of Russian who know the high-frequency noun mashina ‘car’, can guess that mashinoj— ‘car’ in the Instrumental case—a low-frequency form that they may not have encountered, and do not have stored in their mental lexicon, refers to ‘car’ (even if they do not fully process the information about the case). This would be difficult to explain according to the non-decompositional account that presupposes whole-word storage and access.

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tion was observed for more complex stem allomorphy. A masked priming word naming study also showed priming effects, but this time for French regular and semi-regular 1st conjugation verbs in L2 French learners that increased with higher proficiency (Coughlin & Tremblay, 2014). In two visual lexical decision experiments, Portin et al. (2007, 2008) also discuss the role of L2 proficiency and L1 background. Their studies involving L2 speakers of Swedish with different L1 backgrounds (Finnish, Hungarian, and Chinese) showed that L2 speakers gradually develop whole-word representations (and stop showing morphological decomposition costs), first, for highfrequency words, and only later, for lower-frequency words. This finding implies a developmental trajectory from decomposition to whole-word storage of inflected words with greater L2 proficiency, which goes in the opposite direction to the one postulated by Ullman: wholeword storage at lower proficiency with decomposition mechanisms available only at higher proficiency (Ullman, 2001, 2012). It also supports the role of L1 background with the differences documented for L1 speakers of Chinese, a morphologically poor language, and Hungarian, a highly inflectional language (see also Vainio et al., 2014). The empirical evidence on the presence or absence of decomposition of nonnative inflected words reviewed above is primarily obtained with the help of two experimental paradigms: primed (Basnight-Brown et al., 2007; Clahsen et al., 2010; Feldman et al., 2010; Gor & Jackson, 2013) or unprimed (Portin et al., 2007, 2008) lexical decision tasks. Several points are important to consider. First, the masked priming method with short visual exposure to the entire word draws on automatic early morphoorthographic mechanisms (Rastle & Davis, 2008; Rastle et al., 2004) and, therefore, a priori disfavors nonnative speakers who are notoriously slower than native speakers in lexical processing (see, e.g., Basnight-Brown et al., 2007; Gor & Cook, 2010; Gor & Jackson, 2013; Lehtonen & Laine, 2003; Silva & Clahsen, 2008). Second, the materials, including the structure of nonwords and fillers, and overall experimental design can induce or weaken the effect of inflection on lexical access. Third, the disparity in the results of different studies can be potentially explained by two main participant-related factors: L2 proficiency level (Coughlin & Tremblay, 2014; Gor & Jackson, 2013), and L1 background (more specifically, morphological structure of the L1) (Basnight-Brown et al., 2007; Feldman et al., 2010; Portin et al., 2007, 2008). With regard to proficiency, there remains a controversy regarding the direction of the developmental trajectory in nonnative morphological decomposition—from whole-word storage to decomposition, or from decomposition to whole-word storage—that has not been resolved. The present study proposes and explores yet a different scenario, namely, when nonnative decomposition of inflected words develops from decomposition for stem access only (affix stripping) to full processing of morphosyntactic information (including the recombination and checking stage). This is a novel view of the locus of nonnative difficulties in the processing of inflected words, and to the best of our knowledge, it has not been explored in the literature on nonnative morphological processing. Such a view is inspired by both behav-

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ioral and neurolinguistic findings on native speakers’ morphological processing (Fruchter & Marantz, 2015; Lehtonen et al., 2006, 2007, 2009; Taft, 2004). These findings suggest that in native speakers, decomposition is automatic and does not incur processing costs; conversely, the processing costs (which are an indication of a processing effort) are incurred at the recombination and checking stage that follows the initial decomposition. If, indeed, this is the locus of the processing effort in native speakers, then it may possibly create a bottleneck in nonnative processing of inflection. Additionally, the present study aims to examine how morphological processing strategies change across different levels of proficiency of nonnative speakers. While this study manipulates L2 proficiency, it controls for the native language background, and examines a situation when speakers with a native language that uses limited inflectional morphology (English) study a language with rich morphology (Russian as L2). The present study Several aspects of previous studies on nonnative morphological decomposition in lexical access call for further research. First, most of the recent work on nonnative decomposition of inflected words is done on verbal morphology (Clahsen et al., 2013; Gor & Jackson, 2013; Jacob et al., 2013; Kirkici & Clahsen, 2012). This work is inspired by the debates surrounding the differences in the processing of regular and irregular verbal morphology, which started with English past-tense inflection, and have led to a realization that regularity is a gradual feature of inflection in many languages, and should not be treated dichotomously (see Gor & Jackson, 2013, for a review). At the same time, the contribution of the inflectional paradigm to the organization of the nonnative mental lexicon and lexical access has been largely unexplored. While, to the best of our knowledge, no research has been done to date on L2 processing of case marking in lexical access, recent studies on native lexical access of Serbian nouns have confirmed native sensitivity to the properties of the inflectional paradigm (Milin, Filipovic´ Ðurdevic´, & Moscoso del Prado Martin, 2009). The present study consists of two auditory LDT experiments which explore native and nonnative sensitivity to the Russian regular nominal inflection organized in inflectional paradigms. This study capitalizes on the idea that differences in response latencies in lexical access of inflected words reflect differences in morphological processing costs (Lehtonen & Laine, 2003; Portin et al., 2007, 2008). The differences in the processing costs between the citation and oblique cases were explored in the study by Lukatela, Gligorijevic, Kostic´, and Turvey (1980). Their study maintained that the Nominative singular case in the Serbian nominal paradigm serves as the nucleus and the embodiment of the noun’s frequency, with lexically represented oblique cases, which cluster uniformly around the Nominative nucleus. The Russian nominal paradigm is similar to the Serbian one, and we hypothesized that if the satellite-entries hypothesis by Lukatela and colleagues is correct in assigning a special status to the Nominative singular case, the same pattern of results should be observed

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in a LDT involving Russian nouns in the Nominative singular and oblique cases. This study uses only one oblique case, the Genitive, and thus, remains agnostic to the claim about the uniform distance of all oblique cases from the citation form. While the present study follows Lukatela et al. (1980) in its comparison of the processing costs for the Nominative and an oblique case, it does not subscribe to the full-listing model espoused in their study. On the contrary, it controls surface and lemma frequency of the critical nouns, and thus any differences in the processing cost will have to be attributed to some aspect of morphological processing.4 The present study extends the ideas of Lukatela et al. (1980), and goes beyond the processing differences between citation and oblique forms by looking for the possible locus of the observed processing costs. Note, however, that it is not designed to specifically explore the time course of morphological decomposition in lexical access. Crucially, it is necessary to separate the effects of affix stripping and recombination and checking in order to establish the locus of the processing difficulty in native and nonnative decomposition of inflected words. In overtly inflected words, they are confounded, because the presence of an overt inflection calls both for affix stripping and recombination and checking. By contrast, morphologically complex zero-inflected words in the Russian nominal paradigm are well suited for investigating the processing costs associated with recombination and checking, because the effects of case form (citation or oblique), and inflection type (overt or zero) can be separated. In the absence of an overt affix to strip, we expect the main processing costs to occur at the checking step, when the place of the inflected word form in the inflectional paradigm is identified and lexical and morphosyntactactic information is combined. Materials and design of the study with a reference to the Russian nominal inflection Russian nominal inflection is referred to as declension. Nouns are organized in six-case declensional paradigms similar to Latin. Three main declension types include nouns based on gender and/or stem properties. The first declension includes masculine zero-inflected nouns and neuter nouns with the inflection -o, the second—mostly feminine nouns with the inflection -a, and the third—feminine zero-inflected soft-stem nouns, with additional minor variations in each declension (Shvedova, 1980; Unbegaun, 1957; Wade, 2011). A Russian noun has 12 forms, six in the singular, and six in the plural, with one or more surface inflections, or exponents, for each of the six cases: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Prepositional, Dative, and Instrumental (see Table 1 that illustrates the two declensions used in the present study). The plural paradigm is the same for all first- and second-declension nouns, with one notable exception: masculine zero-inflected nouns in the Nominative singular have an overt inflection in the Genitive, and feminine (and 4 Lemma frequency (also called stem-cluster or base frequency) combines the frequencies of all the inflected forms of the word, while surface frequency includes the occurrence of the particular inflected form.

also neuter) nouns with overt inflection in the Nominative singular have a zero inflection in the Genitive. This unique property of the Russian nominal declension became the topic of the seminal article by Jakobson ‘‘The relationship between Genitive and plural in the declension of Russian nouns” (1957). He does not make a distinction between genders in his description of the relationship because morphological structure transcends gender. Indeed, neuter nouns that belong to the same first declension as masculine nouns, but have an overt -o inflection in the Nominative plural, cluster with feminine nouns in the Genitive plural. Thus, surface properties of the inflection, and not purely gender-related differences, determine the inflectional pattern. Noun inflections in Russian mark case, but also number and gender, and in this sense, they are syncretic and polyfunctional. Therefore, gender and number marking is fused with case marking, although not all three are encoded in each case inflection, and there are numerous instances of homonymy in nominal declensions. Some surface inflections, or exponents, occur in more than one case in the paradigm, thus creating an inflectional homonymy. For example, the Dative and Prepositional singular of feminine nouns have the same inflection -e. Also, the same surface inflections may occur in different declensions. For example, both first-declension masculine and second-declension feminine nouns have the inflection -e in the Prepositional singular. The materials used in this study avoid such form ambiguity except for the Nominative/Accusative in first-declension masculine nouns. There, while all masculine nouns have zero inflections in the Nominative, inanimate masculine nouns (more than one half of all masculine nouns) also have zero inflections in the Accusative. It is unclear whether such homonymy can lead to increased expectations based on the cumulative type frequency of all the zero-inflected masculine nouns. The percentages for case frequency in the singular and plural paradigms provided in Table 1 are based on the disambiguated sub-corpus of the Russian National Corpus with 5,944,188 running words at the time of the frequency data retrieval that can be found at: http://www.ruscorpora.ru/ en/ (see Samojlova & Slioussar, 2014, for similar counts). Four case-inflected forms were selected from the first declension masculine and second declension feminine paradigms for the four critical conditions (in bold in Table 1). In the subsequent explanation of the study design we will use the nouns ‘zavod-ø’ factory, ‘bumag-a’ paper, etc. as labels of the conditions with the understanding that they represent balanced (Latin square design) lists of 20 nouns per condition belonging to the same declensional class. Two Nominative singular, or citation forms, the first-declension masculine ‘zavod-ø’ factory, and the second-declension feminine ‘bumag-a’ paper, were first selected. Then, the Nominative singular ‘zavod-ø’ was paired with the Genitive singular (oblique case) ‘zavod-a’, and the Nominative singular ‘bumag-a’ was paired with the Genitive plural (oblique case) ‘bumag-ø’. Note that the zero inflection in ‘zavod-ø’ factory and ‘bumag-ø’ of papers is indicated by ‘-ø’, an accepted notation that refers to the structural properties, as opposed to the surface form of the inflected word. We will not continue to use the ‘-ø’ maker below to make the surface difference between

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K. Gor et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 93 (2017) 315–332 Table 1 First declension masculine nouns, and second declension feminine nouns: Corpus-based frequency of case inflections. Case

Singular

Case frequency

Plural

Case frequency

First declension (masculine nouns)

Nominative Accusative Genitive Prepositional Dative Instrumental

zavod zavod zavod-a zavod-e zavod-u zavod-om

0.367 0.174 0.232 0.085 0.053 0.089

zavod-ɨ zavod-ɨ zavod-ov zavod-akh zavod-am zavod-ami

0.273 0.164 0.349 0.066 0.053 0.096

Second declension (feminine nouns)

Nominative Accusative Genitive Prepositional Dative Instrumental

bumag-a bumag-u bumag-i bumag-e bumag-e bumag-oj

0.315 0.205 0.233 0.107 0.051 0.089

bumag-i bumag-i bumag bumag-akh bumag-am bumag-ami

0.232 0.208 0.313 0.093 0.044 0.110

Note: Case frequency refers to the relative frequency of this case in the paradigm calculated for all nouns in the disambiguated sub-corpus of the Russian National Corpus. Bold indicates the critical conditions for comparison in the study. The symbol ‘‘ɨ” corresponds to a high unrounded vowel that is spelled in Russian as ‘‘s” that alternates with ‘‘i” after phonologically hard consonants.

Table 2 Materials design in Experiments 1 and 2. Word

Lex. status

Morph. form

Inflection type

Inflection/rhyme

Form

Syllables

Lemma log freq.

Surface log freq.

zavod zavod-a bumag-a bumag * rogan * rubad-a

word word word word nonword nonword

citation oblique citation oblique – –

zero overt overt zero – –

-ø -a -a -ø -ø -a

NomMascSg GenMascSg NomFemSg GenFemPl – –

2 3 3 2 2 3

1.98 1.98 1.94 1.94 – –

1.4 (0.23) 1.1 (0.34) 1.01 (0.47) 1.17 (0.44) – –

overtly inflected and zero inflected nouns more salient. The surface and lemma (also referred to as stem or stemcluster) frequencies were matched across the four critical conditions (see Table 2). This was possible because the Genitive case has the highest frequency out of all the oblique cases, and it is approaching that of the Nominative case that has the highest overall frequency in the paradigm.5 Therefore, any differences in the processing costs observed in the auditory LDT for these conditions should be due either to the status of the case form within the paradigm (citation or oblique), or the inflection type (overt or zero). Crucially, the length of stems in syllables was matched across the conditions. To make sure that the acoustic duration of the stimuli did not create a confound, we compared the acoustic length of the word forms with and without the inflection -a. The duration of the –a inflection itself was approximately 20 ms; however, the mean length of the overtly inflected and zero-inflected words did not differ significantly. For example, the acoustic stimulus for ‘bumaga’ lasted for 345 ms, while ‘bumag’ lasted for 348 ms. This example demonstrates the phonetic properties 5 The Nominative singular, the citation form, has the highest frequency in the inflectional paradigm. The Genitive case has the highest frequency among the oblique cases in the singular paradigm, and the highest of all cases in the plural paradigm (higher than the Nominative case). According to Samojlova and Slioussar (2014), the total percentage of the Nominative case in the disambiguated sub-corpus of the Russian National Corpus is 31.0%, and of the Genitive is 26.1%. According to the same authors, the total percentage of masculine nouns is 48.1%, feminine nouns 35.1%, and neuter nouns (not used in this study) 16.7%. Singular have a higher frequency of occurrence in the disambiguated sub-corpus (77.9%) than plural nouns (22.1%).

(0.24) (0.24) (0.36) (0.36)

of Russian words that are beyond the scope of this study: the addition of an unstressed vowel (the inflection) may not lengthen the word acoustically (as in ‘bumaga’), because the stressed vowel in the stem gets additional lengthening in the zero-inflected form (as in ‘bumag’), while the unstressed final vowel is very short in duration. Experimental stimuli consisted of 440 items (160 critical items (80 words and 80 matched nonwords) and 280 fillers (180 words and 100 nonwords)). The 160 critical items were counterbalanced across two presentation lists such that no participant was exposed to the same-stem item twice. Fillers were kept constant across lists. There were 360 items in each list; the order of the presentation of items was randomized. The words were selected from the frequency dictionary of Russian (Sharoff, 2001, 2006). All nonwords in Experiment 1 contained nonexistent stems that complied with Russian phonotactic rules. The critical nonwords were matched with the real words in all conditions in the corresponding type of inflection, e.g., the zero-inflected nonword ‘*rogan’ was matched to ‘zavod’. Nonwords in Experiment 2 were manipulated such that real-word stems were combined with real-word inflections, but the latter were taken from the wrong inflectional paradigm. Filler items were included in order to make the critical comparisons less obvious to testtakers. The fillers were composed of the following categories of nouns: neuter nouns in the Nominative singular case, feminine and masculine nouns with the inflection e (Dative and/or Prepositional singular case), masculine and feminine nouns ending in a hard or soft consonant, and real words and nonwords with real stems and real

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derivational suffixes that could be legally or illegally combined with the stem. The materials were recorded by a female native speaker of Russian in a sound-attenuated booth. The speaker read the items one by one in a clear citation style. Two or more recordings of each item were made, and the best-sounding token was chosen and included in the test stimuli. All sound files were subsequently normalized for amplitude. Based on the properties of the Russian nominal paradigm outlined above, and the materials design, we can formulate specific hypotheses regarding our experimental conditions. The study first establishes the native baseline, and then tests the same claims for nonnative morphological processing, while focusing on the effect of language proficiency on the morphological processing mechanisms in a morphologically rich L2. The design of the study allows us to examine whether the morphological processing of Russian nouns depends on the status of the case form (citation or oblique) or the type of inflection (overt or zero). The comparisons between the four experimental conditions are justified because lemma and surface frequencies are balanced, and crucially, the same surface inflections are used in a crossed design: zero or -a. Two possible outcomes of the results are entertained: 1. zavod = bumag < bumaga = zavoda If we observe a main effect of inflection (overt or zero), this pattern will support the idea that the processing costs in word recognition are associated with overt affix stripping (Taft, 2004). In this outcome, the type of the case form (citation or oblique) will not play a role. 2. bumaga = zavod < bumag = zavoda If we observe a main effect of case form, this pattern will support the idea put forth by Lukatela et al. (1980) about case hierarchy, suggesting that nouns in the citation form are processed faster than nouns in the oblique case form regardless of the type of inflection. Such results will also indicate that the processing costs for the oblique case forms are mainly incurred due to recombination and checking, and not due to affix stripping. Indeed, the costs of affix stripping for the same surface inflection in different cases such as the -a inflection in the Nominative feminine singular ‘bumaga’ and in the Genitive masculine singular ‘zavoda’ should not differ. If a difference in the processing costs for these two case-inflected noun forms is observed, this will imply that extra processing time was used to check the oblique case-inflected form, ‘zavoda’.6 For nonnative speakers, the goal of the study is to show that, while they decompose inflected words in lexical access, the efficiency of decomposition is contingent on the proficiency level. L2 speakers may not always process the inflected word beyond affix stripping because they

6 While the study expects morphological decomposition to take place, it cannot a priori rule out the possibility of whole-word access. If RTs to words in all four conditions matched on surface frequency do not differ significantly, this will be compatible with the idea that inflected words are stored as whole words in the mental lexicon.

focus primarily on accessing the lexical meaning of the stem, and may underuse recombination and checking mechanisms, which provide access to morphosyntactic information. Experiment 1 Participants Forty-four participants (22 native speakers of Russian and 22 L2 speakers of Russian as a foreign language) took part in the study. The native speakers were graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in Russian universities. They were born in Russia and had spent most of their lives there. Their age ranged from 19 to 29 years old (M = 24.55, SD = 3.53). The L2 group included British (N = 12) and American (N = 10) speakers of Russian. Most of them were enrolled in college at the time of testing. Thirteen participants had majors in Modern Languages (including Russian), and 14 had lived in Russia (M = 5.06 months, SD = 2.93). Their age ranged from 20 to 23 years old (M = 21.56, SD = 0.83). All L2 speakers were asked to complete a language background questionnaire with questions about their Russian learning experience, as well as rate their Russian proficiency on a scale from 1 (minimum) to 10 (maximum) in different linguistic domains. In addition, prior to the experiment, all L2 participants were required to take an online Russian cloze test developed and piloted by the researchers. The participants read the text with 25 blanks and typed in suitable words in the blanks. They were given 15 min to complete the test. The maximum number of correct responses was 25. Each accurate response received a score of 1, while inaccurate responses received a score of 0. The scores were added up to yield a final overall proficiency score. The language background information as well as participants’ proficiency scores are presented in Table 3. Informed consent was obtained from each participant, and the experimental protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board. Participants were reimbursed for their participation. Procedure Participants were tested remotely using DMDX presentation software (Forster & Forster, 2003).7 Participants received a downloadable experimental package with detailed written instructions that explained the experimental procedure and the task. They were instructed to remove all distractions and wear headphones throughout the duration of the experiment. To make sure that the experiment works as desired on their computer, they were required to perform an equipment check, which was reported to the experimenters’ server. During the experiment, participants heard spoken Russian words and nonwords. Their task was to judge whether or not the word that they heard was a real Russian word or not. They pressed 7 The results of the experiments delivered via the remote version of DMDX have proven to be comparable to the results of the studies conducted at a laboratory (Witzel, Cornelius, Witzel, Forster, & Forster, 2013).

K. Gor et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 93 (2017) 315–332 Table 3 Language learning history for participants in Experiment 1. Parameter

Mean (SD)

Age when started learning Russian (years old) Formal instruction in Russian (in years) Percent of daily use of Russian (%) Self-rated pronunciation in Russian Self-rated conversational proficiency in Russian Self-rated listening proficiency in Russian Self-rated reading proficiency in Russian Self-rated writing proficiency in Russian Self-rated knowledge of Russian grammar Proficiency cloze test

16.63 (2.5) 3.9 (1.4) 22.5 (19) 6.4 (1.3) 6.25 (1) 6.3 (1.9) 6.6 (1.4) 6 (1.3) 6.18 (1.6) 16.57 (3.4)

the Right Control key to answer ‘Yes, the word is a real Russian word’ or the Left Control key to answer ‘No, the word is not a real Russian word.’ They were instructed to use the spacebar to advance through instruction screens. Each trial began with a fixation point presented on the computer screen for 500 ms followed by a spoken word or a nonword. If the test-taker did not make a response within 4000 ms, the program proceeded with the presentation of the next item. Reaction times were recorded from target onsets. Participants were able to take three self-timed breaks during the test. The experiment was preceded by 20 practice trials to familiarize participants with the nature of the task. After each practice trial, participants received feedback about accuracy of their decision. No feedback was provided during the presentation of experimental trials. Results A linear mixed-effects modeling approach was used to analyze log-transformed reaction time (RT) data, and a logistic mixed-effects model (glm function) was used to analyze error rate data. We performed and compared a series of fitted mixed-effects regression models for native and L2 data in order to measure goodness of model fit without unnecessary parameter overfitting. Model comparisons were carried out using the Akaike information criterion (AIC) (Akaike, 1974), because it is recommended for the evaluation of mixed-effects models (Fang, 2011; Vaida & Blanchard, 2005). A model with three factor terms (group: native or L2, inflection: overt or zero, and form: citation or oblique), and their interactions proved to be the most parsimonious fit to the data (AIC = 907.59). L2 participants’ proficiency cloze test score was not a significant predictor of their performance; accordingly, it was not included as a variable in the final model. Subjects and items were entered as random effects with varying intercepts in order to model the repeated measures nature of the experimental design. Levels of the fixed factors were treatment-coded with the intercept estimating a dependent variable (RT or error rate) for the citation form with the overt inflection (‘bumaga’) in the native group of participants. The models’ estimated coefficients for each factor and interaction terms, standard errors, degrees of freedom, the t statistic (or z statistic), and the p values are presented in Table A1 in Appendix A. The models’ coefficient estimates should be interpreted as the change in the dependent variable brought about by the change of the fixed factor from one

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level to another. All data analyses were done in R programming environment (R Core Team, 2015), using lme4 package for R (Bates, Maechler, Bolker, & Walker, 2014); degrees of freedom and p-values were generated using lmerTest package (Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, & Christensen, 2015). Reaction times RT analysis was performed on correct trials only. False starts (RT = 0 ms) and response outliers exceeding 2500 ms were excluded from the RT dataset resulting in the rejection of 0.5% of the data. The outcome of the mixed-effects model for the log-transformed RTs as a dependent variable in the native group yielded a significant effect of form (Coefficient estimate = 0.14, SE = 0.03, t = 5.39, p < .001), but no significant effect of inflection (Coefficient estimate = 0.004, SE = 0.03, t = 0.17, p = .87) or the inflection by form interaction (Coefficient estimate = 0.004, SE = 0.04, t = 0.11, p = .9). This main effect of form indicates that the inflected words in the oblique case form (‘zavoda’) were processed significantly more slowly than the words in the Nominative case form (‘bumaga’). The non-significant interaction with inflection indicates that this effect generalizes to zero-inflected words—the presence or absence of the overt inflection did not affect lexical decision latencies in either of the form conditions. The L2 speakers were significantly slower than the native speakers in their responses to the words in the citation form (Coefficient estimate = 0.12, SE = 0.03, t = 3.85, p < .001). Notably, however, we found a significant group by form interaction (Coefficient estimate = 0.1, SE = 0.02, t = 4.19, p < .001), which means that the effect of form was significantly reduced for the L2 group compared to the native group. In fact, when the same model was fitted to the data with the intercepts for L2, the effect of form was no longer significant (Coefficient estimate = 0.05, SE = 0.03, t = 1.69, p = .1). Indeed, combined with the insights gleaned from Fig. 1, we observe that native speakers show a clear processing advantage for words in the citation form (‘bumaga’ and ‘zavod’) over words in the oblique form (‘bumag’ and ‘zavoda’) regardless of the inflection. No such difference is observed in the L2 group. Error rate Error rate analysis demonstrated that native speakers made 3.6% of errors and L2 speakers made 7.7% of errors. Given the smaller lexicon and the more error-prone lexical access in the L2, these differences were expected. Generalized mixed-effects models (with a binomial function) with the same fixed and random factors as for the reaction time analysis, were performed for the error rate data. A significant effect of group (Coefficient estimate = 1.12, SE = 0.53, z = 2.13, p < .05), and a three-way interaction of group by form by inflection (Coefficient estimate = 1.85, SE = 0.79, z = 2.34, p < .05) were found to be significant (see Fig. 2). The interaction suggests that the relationship between the two variables—form and inflection—differed in the two groups of participants: while native speakers

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Fig. 1. Mean reaction times in Experiment 1. Note: The color of the points in this and all the following figures distinguishes between two levels of the variable Form: citation (black) vs. oblique (white); the shape of the points distinguishes between two levels of the variable Inflection: overt (circle) and zero (triangle).

Fig. 2. Mean error rates in Experiment 1.

always made fewer errors for nouns in the citation form regardless of the inflection type (‘bumaga’ and ‘zavod’), L2 speakers made fewer errors only for the citation form with an overt inflection (‘bumaga’). To summarize, Experiment 1 has demonstrated RT and error rate differences in native and nonnative processing of single words in a LDT. Native speakers showed additional processing costs for oblique-case inflected Russian nouns regardless of the type of inflection, overt or zero. In contrast to the native group, L2 speakers, who were overall slower, showed no RT difference in the processing costs for the nouns in the citation form and oblique-case forms. Experiment 2 Experiment 1 has demonstrated differences in the way native and nonnative speakers process case-inflected Russian nouns. Specifically, it has shown that nonnative

speakers do not incur additional processing costs for oblique-case inflected nouns, as native speakers do. Experiment 2 further explores nonnative (in)sensitivity to case in lexical access and asks two questions: whether the depth of nonnative morphological processing is task-dependent, and whether sensitivity to case marking develops with increasing proficiency. To address these questions, Experiment 2 manipulates the properties of the stimuli and tests three groups of Russian learners at different proficiency levels. Materials The lexical decision task itself—asking participants to decide whether the sound sequence presented in isolation without any context is a real word or not—does not promote decomposition. However, the structure of nonwords in a LDT can encourage or discourage morphological decomposition and draw participants’ attention to the

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K. Gor et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 93 (2017) 315–332 Table 4 Language learning history for participants in Experiment 2. Parameter

Age when started learning Russian (years old) Formal instruction in Russian (in years) Percent of daily use of Russian (%) Self-rated pronunciation in Russian Self-rated conversational proficiency in Russian Self-rated listening proficiency in Russian Self-rated reading proficiency in Russian Self-rated writing proficiency in Russian Self-rated knowledge of Russian grammar Proficiency cloze test

need in checking the recombined word (Taft, 2004). The stimuli in the critical conditions used for Experiment 2 were the same as for Experiment 1, except for additional manipulations in the nonwords condition. In Experiment 1, all nonwords had nonexisting stems, and there were no nonwords created by illegally combining an existing stem and inflection. Accordingly, in Experiment 1, participants could decide whether a sound sequence is a word or a nonword solely based on the information contained in the word stem, without necessarily having to process the inflection. In order to draw the participants’ attention to the inflection and to alert them to check the recombined word, in Experiment 2, we replaced 30 nonwords from Experiment 1 with the nonwords that had real word stems incorrectly combined with inflections (e.g., ‘thought’ + -ing = ‘*thoughting’). Ten nonwords had a 2nd declension feminine stem but a 1st declension masculine Genitive plural inflection, as in ‘*sobakov’ (instead of ‘sobak’ of the dogs). Ten nonwords had a 2nd declension stem and a 1st declension Instrumental singular inflection, as in ‘*golovom’ (instead of ‘golovoj’ by the head). Ten nonwords had 1st declension stems and 2nd declension Instrumental singular inflections, as in ‘*divanoj’ (instead of ‘divanom’ by the sofa). Thus, while the nonwords with mismatched inflections from different paradigms did not have lexical entries in the mental lexicon, their components were nonetheless easily recognizable. It was hypothesized that, in order to reject such nonwords, participants could not base their decision solely on the lexical information. The correct decision could only be made after an unsuccessful attempt to recombine the stem and the inflection, thereby invoking the recombination and checking of the recomposed inflected word.

Participants Thirty-two native speakers of Russian (22 females, mean age = 30.3) and 64 American speakers of Russian as a foreign language (33 females, mean age = 28.6) participated in Experiment 2. Participant data are presented in Table 4.8 Prior to participation, all nonnative participants were pre-tested through a standard test of oral proficiency, a formal Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), which assigned 8 Due to logistical issues in test administration, 13 participants in Experiment 2 did not fill out the questionnaire.

Mean (SD) ILR 2

ILR 2+

ILR 3

19.1 (3.4) 2.7 (1.1) 18.6 (10.7) 6.6 (0.9) 6.3 (0.9) 7.1 (1.06) 7.3 (1.5) 6 (1.1) 6.4 (1.3) 17.04 (1.6)

18.9 (3.3) 2.8 (1.1) 23.8 (15) 6.8 (1.4) 7.2 (1.09) 7.5 (0.9) 7.5 (1.3) 6.4 (1.2) 7.15 (1.3) 19.6 (1.4)

18 (3.7) 3.6 (0.7) 30 (20.6) 7.1 (1.4) 7.2 (1.1) 7.9 (0.9) 7.8 (1.1) 6.3 (1.2) 6.7 (1.6) 20 (2.4)

them a proficiency level on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale widely used in the USA for government testing. Based on the OPI scores, L2 participants were subdivided into three proficiency groups matched to the ILR levels 2 (N = 16), 2+ (N = 16), and 3 (N = 32). These ILR levels correspond to Advanced, Advanced High, and Superior oral proficiency on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) academic scale. All participants completed a language background questionnaire and signed the informed consent approved by the Institutional Review Board. In addition, all L2 participants took the same Russian proficiency cloze test, as did the participants in Experiment 1, which made it possible to compare their proficiency levels. The cloze test scores for the participants in Experiment 1 were significantly lower than those of the participants with ILR 2+ (p < .01), and ILR 3 (p < .001) proficiency levels in Experiment 2, but not lower than those with the ILR 2 level (p = 1.0). Procedure The procedure in Experiment 2 was the same as in Experiment 1 (see above). Results The same analytic approach used to analyze data in Experiment 1 was adopted to analyze log-transformed RTs and error rate in Experiment 2. A series of fitted mixed-effects regression models were compared based on the AIC. A model with three fixed factor terms and their interactions (group: native, ILR 2, ILR 2+, ILR 3, inflection: overt or zero, and form: citation or oblique), and two random factors (subjects, items) provided the best fit to the data (AIC = 1547.8 for the RT model, AIC = 2172.7 for the error rate model). Models with different intercepts for proficiency (native, ILR2, ILR2+, ILR3) were run to evaluate main effects in each group. Table A2 in Appendix A demonstrates a representative model outcome with estimated coefficients, standard errors, degrees of freedom, the t statistic (or z statistic), and the associated p values. The intercept estimated log RT or error (depending on the model) for the citation form with the overt inflection (‘bumaga’) in the native speaker group; i.e., all simple effects are calculated for native speakers, and their interactions with nonnative proficiency levels portray how these

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effects differ in a given proficiency group in comparison with the native speaker group. Reaction times As in Experiment 1, RT analysis was performed on correct trials. False starts and response outliers exceeding 2500 ms were removed (0.99% of the data). The results of the mixed-effects model with the intercept ‘bumaga’ showed that all L2 groups (ILR 2, ILR 2+, ILR 3) were significantly slower in word recognition compared to the native group. More interestingly, while the analysis did not yield a significant effect of inflection for any of the groups, form was a significant predictor of response latencies in all proficiency groups: (native: Coefficient estimate = 0.24, SE = 0.03, t = 9.11, p < .001; ILR 2: Coefficient estimate = 0.13, SE = 0.03, t = 3.46, p < .001; ILR 2+: Coefficient estimate = 0.13, SE = 0.03, t = 3.48, p < .001; ILR 3: Coefficient estimate = 0.08, SE = 0.03, t = 2.7, p < .001). However, a significant interaction between form and proficiency in the ILR 2 (Coefficient estimate = 0.13, SE = 0.03, t = 5.13, p < .001), and ILR 2+ (Coefficient estimate = 0.1, SE = 0.03, t = 3.81, p < .001) groups, and the lack thereof in the ILR 3 group (Coefficient estimate = 0.03, SE = 0.02,

t = 1.52, p = .13) confirms that the effect of the morphological form in the ILR 3 group was native-like, whereas it was significantly reduced for ILR 2 and ILR 2+ groups. The absence of the main effect for inflection, and the fact that the interaction between inflection and form was not significant together suggest that all groups processed citation forms faster compared to oblique-case forms regardless of the type of inflection—overt or zero (see Fig. 3). Error rate Error rate analysis showed that native speakers made 2% of errors and L2 speakers made 7% of errors. The outcome of the generalized mixed-effects model with error rate as a dependent variable produced the following results. Native speakers showed a significant effect of form: they made more errors in the oblique-case conditions (‘bumag’ and ‘zavoda’) compared to the citation conditions (‘bumaga’ and ‘zavod’) (Coefficient estimate = 2.4, SE = 0.5, t = 4.72, p < .001). When the model was refit with the intercepts for L2 groups, the effect of form was only significant in the ILR 3 group (Coefficient estimate = 1.1, SE = 0.4, t = 2.8, p < .01). Crucially, however, the effect of form was significantly reduced for all L2 groups compared

Fig. 3. Mean reaction times in Experiment 2.

Fig. 4. Mean error rates in Experiment 2.

K. Gor et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 93 (2017) 315–332

to the native group, as indicated by the significant group by form interactions (ILR 2: Coefficient estimate = 1.98, SE = 0.6, t = 3.34, p < .001; ILR 2+: Coefficient estimate = 1.8, SE = 0.6, t = 3.04, p < .01; ILR 3: Coefficient estimate = 1.2, SE = 0.5, t = 2.33 p < .05). None of the groups showed a significant effect of inflection (see Fig. 4). To summarize, results of Experiment 2 were similar to Experiment 1 for native speakers, but differed for the nonnative groups. In Experiment 2, both native and L2 groups showed a processing advantage in RTs for a citation form over an oblique form, regardless of the inflection: overt or zero. In the L2 group, this processing advantage was smaller in magnitude than in the native group at lower proficiency levels (ILR 2 and 2+), while it was nativelike in the highest proficiency ILR 3 group. Error rate analyses showed a significant effect of form—a higher error rate for oblique-case inflected nouns—in native speakers, and only in the highest-proficiency group of L2 speakers. Discussion The study tested native and nonnative speakers of Russian on an auditory LDT, and compared the processing costs for overtly inflected and zero-inflected nouns in the citation and oblique-case forms. The goal was to explore the processing mechanisms used by native and nonnative speakers to access inflected words in the mental lexicon. If the initial decomposition stage, i.e. affix stripping (Taft, 2004), is driving the processing costs, additional processing costs will be incurred in decomposing an overt inflection regardless of the case form of the noun, since affix stripping is blind to the place of the case in the hierarchical structure of the inflectional paradigm. If, conversely, the case of the inflected noun (citation or oblique) matters more than the actual surface inflection form (overt or zero), then the status of each case in the paradigm is driving the processing costs. The study was designed to establish whether native and nonnative participants show the same pattern of processing costs, and evaluated the role of proficiency in L2 morphological decomposition. In both experiments, native participants processed the Russian nouns in the Nominative singular, the citation form, faster than the nouns in the oblique case, the Genitive. The native error rate was also higher for the oblique case. The type of inflection—overt or zero—did not have a significant effect on lexical decision latencies. The outcome of the current study, therefore, does not support the full listing account (Butterworth, 1983), according to which one can expect the same response latencies for word forms matched in surface frequency and length. The observed additional processing costs support decomposition, at least, for oblique-case inflected nouns. At the same time, the study does not explicitly test decomposition of the citation forms, and therefore, has to remain agnostic with regard to the decompositional status of citation forms. Such findings are in conformity with the satellite-entries hypothesis (Lukatela et al., 1980), according to which the Nominative case receives a special status in lexical access. This implies a hierarchical structure of the inflectional paradigm in the mental representation, with the citation form as the nucleus. It should be noted that this interpre-

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tation, based on the structural properties of the inflectional paradigm, is not in conflict with the case frequency-based interpretation of the effects, as frequency and ‘coreness’ are conflated in the Russian Nominative singular case. However, the current study is not designed to either support or refute the claim that all the cases are equidistant from the nucleus in a Slavic nominal paradigm, the Nominative case (Lukatela et al., 1980). Neither does it support the whole-word representation position espoused by Lukatela and colleagues with regard to all inflected nouns. The most significant finding on native processing of inflected words concerns zero-inflected nouns in the oblique case. For such nouns, no affix stripping is needed, and the fact that they incur processing costs equal to those for overtly inflected nouns in the same oblique case implies that the processing costs are mainly incurred not due to affix stripping, but due to recombination and checking. Crucially, words with zero inflections are processed as the ones with overt inflections, and thus the morphosyntactic status of the inflection (its case) overrides the properties of the surface form. This conclusion is in agreement with the findings of the fMRI study by Pliatsikas et al. (2014) who found a neural substrate for morphological complexity in the absence of overt marking for English derivation. Thus, the study documents the processing costs for both overt and zero oblique inflections, thereby supporting the understanding that the locus of these processing costs is structural complexity, which leads to increased recombination and checking costs for oblique caseinflected nouns, rather than affix stripping. Let us now turn to nonnative morphological processing that differed between the two experiments. In Experiment 1, the pattern of the processing costs observed in nonnative speakers revealed differences in comparison to native speakers. The L2 group did not show sensitivity to case, and incurred the same processing costs for all cases, and for both overt and zero inflections. There are two possible interpretations of this finding. First, it is possible that nonnative speakers did not decompose any of the words in lexical access, and relied on full listing. Note that the word lists for the critical conditions were matched on lemma and surface frequency. The second possibility is that nonnative speakers relied on affix stripping to access the stem and did not recombine and check the inflected word form. The study does not rule out nonnative whole-word retrieval in Experiment 1. However, there are reasons to believe that the nonnative mental lexicon stores less inflected words in a developed paradigm than the native one, and that whole-word representations of oblique-case inflected words are less available for retrieval for nonnative than native speakers (cf. Portin et al., 2007, 2008). Indeed, late L2 learners’ input is limited, and they are exposed to the second language not from birth, but at a later age, therefore, they are less likely to store whole-word representations for all the inflected forms in the paradigm than are native speakers (Crossley et al., 2012; Gor & Jackson, 2013). Additionally, auditory presentation with the stem heard before the inflection encourages access of the stem and affix stripping. We believe that the design of Experiment 1, namely, the absence of nonwords with real stems in the stimuli, did not motivate nonnative participants to

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proceed with recombination and checking, and apparently, they did not automatically engage these processes.9 Thus, we interpret these results as the absence of checking for oblique-case nouns in the nonnative group. To further explore nonnative morphological processing and establish a developmental trajectory, Experiment 2 used real stems with real inflections combined in an illegal way to draw participants’ attention to the need for checking the inflected noun. Nonnative participants divided into three proficiency levels participated in Experiment 2, as well as a control group of native speakers, which was required for statistical comparisons. All three nonnative groups showed sensitivity to case in Experiment 2—they took longer to respond to oblique-case inflected nouns than to citation forms, regardless of the type of inflection: overt or zero. Crucially, according to the results of the proficiency cloze test, the lowest-proficiency group in Experiment 2, ILR 2, did not differ significantly in proficiency from the nonnative group in Experiment 1. Therefore, the nonword manipulation has indeed produced the expected effect—nonnative participants started checking the morphological structure of the whole recombined word, and the difference in the processing costs due to the case status in the inflectional paradigm has emerged. This difference in RTs due to case was smaller for two lower-proficiency groups, ILR 2 and 2+, and was nativelike in the highest proficiency group ILR 3. The analysis of error rate revealed the same tendency: error rate was higher for the oblique case only in the highest-proficiency nonnative group. Therefore, the study reports a novel finding: it documents a developmental trajectory towards greater sensitivity to case inflection in lexical access with increasing proficiency in L2 speakers. When we evaluate the obtained results, we have to bear in mind that lexical access of inflected nouns could also be mediated by such variables as gender, number, case frequency, and the acoustic length of the stimulus word. Great care was taken to account for these variables and, where possible, to control for them. There are no reasons to believe that these factors were the driving force behind the observed response patterns uniquely in the Genitive case. First of all, as explained above, gender and number are syncretically encoded in the case inflection. Given that masculine nouns are more frequent in Russian than feminine nouns (48.1% for masculine and 35.1% for feminine for all nouns in the corpus), masculine nouns could have been processed faster. However, the response latencies for the masculine and feminine Nominative-case nouns did not differ statistically in either experiment, for either native or nonnative participants.

9 One should note that the mean RTs in native and nonnative participants represented in Fig. 1 may be visually misleading, because they may suggest that L2 participants were comparable to native participants on RTs for the oblique cases, but slower for the citation forms. In fact, L2 speakers are notoriously slower than native speakers in word recognition, and therefore, their RTs should normally be longer for all the corresponding conditions (Basnight-Brown et al., 2007; Gor & Cook, 2010; Gor & Jackson, 2013; Lehtonen & Laine, 2003; Silva & Clahsen, 2008). With this in mind, one can say that L2 participants were predictably slower than native speakers in processing the citation forms, but ‘‘unusually” fast in processing the oblique cases.

Number differentiates one condition, the Genitive plural ‘bumag’ from the other three conditions. If the lower frequency of the plural has led to increased processing costs for ‘bumag’ compared to ‘bumaga’, this effect is already subsumed under the prediction that there will be increased processing costs for non-citation inflected words. Therefore, the oblique case and plural number could have led to a joint effect compared to the citation form. The difference in corpus-based frequency between the Nominative and the Genitive case could have worked in tandem with pure structural case hierarchy and have increased the processing costs for the Genitive-inflected nouns observed in native speakers, and in a less consistent way, in nonnative speakers. However, this difference is rather small if one compares the cumulative frequency of use based on the corpus data: 30.0% for the Nominative and 26.1% for the Genitive across all nouns (Samojlova & Slioussar, 2014). Additionally, frequency of use typically reflects the functional load of different forms in the paradigm, and the Genitive is both the most frequent and most functionally loaded oblique case in the Russian nominal paradigm, especially because it is heavily involved in quantification (Jakobson, 1957). Finally, the nouns in two cases, such as ‘bumaga’ and ‘bumag’, differed in the presence or absence of the overt inflection -a, and therefore differed in length by one phoneme. We have measured the length of the acoustic stimuli to make sure that the time needed to process a word that is longer in one vowel segment would not impact the results. According to the measurements described in the Materials section, there was no significant difference in acoustic length between the word forms with overt and zero inflections. Additionally, the length of the unstressed -a inflection was approximately 20 ms, and consequently, was too short compared to the magnitude of the observed RT differences. Notably, there was no difference between the RTs in two Nominative-case conditions (‘zavod’ and ‘bumaga’) in either native or nonnative groups in either experiment, which is indicative of the smaller role of variations in word length compared to the inflectional properties of words. Note also that the stems had the same length in syllables across all four conditions; they were disyllabic— ‘zavod-’ and ‘bumag-’; therefore, the time needed to access the stem did not create a confound. The study makes a step forward in bridging the gap between two existing perspectives on nonnative processing of inflected words. On the one hand, nonnative speakers need to decompose lower-frequency inflected words, because, due to reduced language input, they may have not encountered them, and therefore do not represent them as whole words in the mental lexicon. Yet, they can access the lexical meaning of familiar stems even when they encounter unfamiliar word forms. On the other hand, L2 speakers are notorious for making morphosyntactic errors (DeKeyser, Alfi-Shabtay, & Ravid, 2010); they are also often insensitive to morphosyntactic violations in sentence processing (Clahsen & Felser, 2006; Jiang, Hu, Chrabaszcz, & Ye, 2015). These observations have given rise to the shallow-structure hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006), according to which L2 sentence processing

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More research is needed before the results of the present study can be generalized to other nonnative speaker populations. We have purposefully chosen a combination of a morphologically poor L1 (English) and a morphologically rich L2 (Russian) in order not to favor morphological decomposition in nonnative participants as a strategy transferred from their native language. Therefore, it remains to be seen if lower-proficiency nonnative participants, whose L1 has a developed inflectional morphology, also resort to affix stripping without recombination and checking in morphological processing.

relies on lexical access and word meanings rather than the morphosyntactic information provided by grammatical markers, such as inflectional morphology. If indeed, nonnative speakers decompose inflected words into stems and inflections in lexical access, how do they process the inflections? While this issue is not directly addressed in the current study, it is useful to look at the possible implications of its results for nonnative morphosyntactic processing. Decomposition into stem and inflection, or affix stripping, ensures successful access of the lexical meaning of the stem. According to the present study, it is possible that under cognitive pressure, i.e., in a situation of continuous speech processing in real time, lower-proficiency L2 speakers decompose inflected words and access their lexical meaning, but do not always recombine and check them in order to process the morphosyntactic information that they carry. Such low-proficiency nonnative strategy potentially leads to inefficient sentence processing, when L2 speakers ignore recombination and checking of the inflected words, and the morphosyntactic information that they generate. It is compatible with nonnative insensitivity reported in studies of online sentence processing (Clahsen & Felser, 2006; Jiang et al., 2015). This processing strategy gives way to deeper morphological processing that relies on recombination and checking in more proficient nonnative speakers (ILR 2+ and ILR 3 in Experiment 2). Of course, morphological processing at the word level does not exclude another possible locus of difficulty in nonnative sentence processing: syntactic processing of agreement dependencies.

Acknowledgments The authors express their gratitude to the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland, and the Slavic and East European Language Resource Center at Duke University for providing the funding for this study, and to Scott Jackson, Jeff Witzel, and Naoko Witzel for help with programming and online delivery of the experiments. Some of the material reported in the paper is based upon work supported, in whole or in part, with funding from the United States Government. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Maryland, College Park and/or any agency or entity of the United States Government. This material is being made available for personal or academic research use. The article was prepared within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Eco-

Table A1 Mixed-effects models’ output for log-transformed RTs and error rate as dependent variables in Experiment 1. Reaction time Fixed effects Intercept (‘bumaga’ in Native) Form Inflection Form  Inflection L2 L2  Form L2  Inflection L2  Form  Inflection Random effects Subject Item Residual

Estimate 6.95 0.14 0.004 0.004 0.12 0.10 0.01 0.02 Variance 0.007 0.005 0.027

SE

df

t value

p value

0.03 0.03 0.03 0.04 0.03 0.02 0.02 0.03

105.3 106.1 103.9 108.1 65.7 1433.6 1434.5 1435.6

263.28 5.39 0.17 0.11 3.85 4.19 0.40 0.51

<.001 <.001 .87 .91 <.001 <.001 .69 .61

z value

p value

SD 0.086 0.068 0.165

Error rate Fixed effects Intercept (‘bumaga’ in Native) Form Inflection Form  Inflection L2 L2  Form L2  Inflection L2  Form  Inflection Random effects Subject Item

Estimate 4.07 1.11 0.09 0.91 1.12 0.08 1.08 1.85 Variance 0.277 0.753

SE 0.50 0.58 0.65 0.79 0.53 0.60 0.67 0.79 SD 0.526 0.868

8.11 1.91 0.14 1.16 2.13 0.14 1.63 2.34

<.001 .06 .89 .25 <.05 .89 .10 <.05

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Table A2 Mixed-effects models’ output for log-transformed RTs and error rate as dependent variables in Experiment 2. Reaction time Fixed effects Intercept (‘bumaga’ in Native) Form Inflection Form  Inflection ILR 2 ILR 2+ ILR 3 ILR 2  Form ILR 2+  Form ILR 3  Form ILR 2  Inflection ILR 2+  Inflection ILR 3  Inflection ILR 2  Form  Inflection ILR 2+  Form  Inflection ILR 3  Form  Inflection Random effects Subject Item Residual

Estimate 6.903 0.240 0.005 0.033 0.133 0.133 0.084 0.134 0.100 0.032 0.010 0.002 0.013 0.028 0.004 0.030 Variance 0.012 0.005 0.032

SE

df

t value

p value

0.027 0.026 0.026 0.037 0.038 0.038 0.031 0.026 0.026 0.021 0.026 0.025 0.020 0.037 0.037 0.030

184 120 113 118 128 128 126 3270 3265 3259 3265 3261 3256 3268 3262 3259

257.03 9.11 0.20 0.90 3.46 3.48 2.70 5.13 3.81 1.52 0.37 0.06 0.62 0.75 0.12 1.01

<.001 <.001 .84 .37 <.001 <.001 <.001 <.001 <.001 .13 .71 .95 .54 .45 .90 .31

z value

p value

SD 0.111 0.068 0.179

Error rate Fixed effects Intercept (‘bumaga’ in Native) Form Inflection Form  Inflection ILR 2 ILR 2+ ILR 3 ILR 2  Form ILR 2+  Form ILR 3  Form ILR 2  Inflection ILR 2+  Inflection ILR 3  Inflection ILR 2  Form  Inflection ILR 2+  Form  Inflection ILR 3  Form  Inflection

Random effects Subject Item

Estimate 4.465 2.409 0.418 0.536 1.666 1.484 1.080 1.976 1.807 1.234 1.156 0.291 0.854 0.151 1.644 0.554

SE 0.467 0.510 0.703 0.801 0.540 0.545 0.500 0.591 0.595 0.531 0.754 0.836 0.731 0.878 0.949 0.818

Variance

SD

0.374 0.636

0.612 0.798

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