Palatalization in the Russian Verb System: A Psycholinguistic Study

Abstract

This paper presents experimental data on the processing of loanwords and nonce words that focuses on morphophonological alternations in Russian. It addresses the issue of how stem allomorphy involving palatalization of the velar/palatal and dental/palatal types in the Russian verb system is processed in adults. The processing of morphophonological alternations is shown to be quite variable (and probably unproductive) and to depend, on the one hand, on the distribution of allomorphs within the verb paradigm, and on the other hand, on verb class productivity. It is hypothesized that these differences should be reflected in child language acquisition.