Preference for single events guides perception in Russian: A phoneme restoration study

Jesse Harris, Natasha Korotkova

Abstract: Given that sentences often underdetermine event construal, how do language users associate event representations with strings? One possibility is that the human language sentence processing system constructs a single event unless the context or grammar suggests otherwise. We present evidence that the perception of complex predicates in Russian is influenced by a general preference for a single event construal. In essence, perceivers are biased to resolve distorted speech towards a single event interpretation when grammatically licensed. In this study, we used the phonemic restoration method to explore how a single event preference would affect the restoration of the conjunction morpheme, which disambiguates between two structures with different event profiles.