Trans-paradigmatic syncretism in case form processing in Russian

Abstract

The paper presents two experiments which studied processing of different case forms of Russian nouns in a sentential context. Target sentences contained a preposition requiring a particular case, and in different experimental conditions, we used a noun in the correct case or in several other cases after it. Many previous studies have compared case forms in isolation, both in Russian and in other languages, but our study revealed that different factors played a role in a sentence: grammaticality and trans-paradigmatic syncretism of case affixes. The former finding was expected, while the latter was novel. Trans-paradigmatic syncretism is discussed in several theoretical approaches and usually assumed to be purely accidental. Its relevance for processing is important both for theoretical morphology and for psycholinguistics.