Animacy information outweighs morphological cues in Russian

Anastasia Stoops, Steven G Luke, Kiel Christianson

Abstract: The present study examined the robustness of morphosyntactic information (inflectional case marking) vs. semantic information (animacy) in non-canonical SOV-and-V structures in Russian, a morphologically rich language with relatively free word order. Results from a self-paced moving window paradigm followed by a comprehension question indicated that case marking was a relatively weak cue during online reading and offline comprehension compared to animacy, which was relied upon heavily throughout. The results suggest that even in languages with rich inflectional morphology, morphosyntax is fragile. Furthermore, the results provide support for memory-based models of sentence processing in which similarity-induced interference affects memory for previously encountered constituents and the integration of incoming material.