Generation of Complex Verbal Morphology in First and Second Language Acquisition: Evidence from Russian

Abstract

This study explores the structure of the mental lexicon and the processing of Russian verbal morphology by two groups of speakers, adult American learners of Russian and Russian children aged 4-6, and reports the results of two matching experiments conducted at the University of Maryland, USA and St. Petersburg State University, Russia. The theoretical framework for this study comes from research on the structure of the mental lexicon and modularity in morphological processing. So far, there are very few studies investigating the processing of complex verbal morphology, with most of the work done on Icelandic, Norwegian, Italian, and Russian. The current views are shaped predominantly by research on English regular and irregular past-tense inflection, which has been conducted within two competing approaches. This study investigates the processing of verbal morphology in Russian, a language with numerous verb classes differing in size and the number and complexity of conjugation rules. It assumes that instead of a sharp opposition of regular and irregular verb processing, a gradual parameter of regularity may be more appropriate for Russian. Therefore, the issue of symbolic rule application versus associative patterning can take on a new meaning for Russian, possibly, with the distinction between default and non-default processing replacing the regular-irregular distinction.

Testing the Semantic Homogeneity Constraint

“…In a number of studies reporting on psycholinguistic experiments, Chernigovskaya, Gor and co--authors (Gor & Chernigovskaya 2004, 2005, Gor 2007, Tkachenko & Chernigovskaya 2010, see also Svistunova 2008) have documented a strong tendency for speakers to use the productive /aj/ suffix instead of the unproductive /a/. This conclusion holds for native speakers of Russian with and without language impairment, as well as L2 learners of Russian.…”

“…1974, Gorbačevič 1978, Andersen 1980, Švedova, ed. 1980: 649, Comrie et al 1996, Kiebzak--Mandera et al 1997, Graudina et al 2001, Gagarina 2003, Gor & Chernigovskaya 2004, 2005, Gor 2007, Nesset 2008b, Svistunova 2008, Nesset 2010a, 2010b, Tkachenko & Chernigovskaya 2010 and references therein), it was only with the advent of large electronic corpora that large--scale studies of the diachronic development became possible. In a recent study based on 66,507 examples excerpted from the Russian National Corpus (www.ruscorpora.ru), Nesset & Kuznetsova (2011) demonstrate that suffix shift is indeed an ongoing process in Contemporary Standard Russian.…”

Stability and Complexity: Russian Suffix Shift over Time

“…This vacillation is attested in dictionaries (e.g., Ožegov andŠvedova 2005, Zaliznjak 2003), and has been studied from a number of theoretical and empirical perspectives (cf. e.g., Andersen 1980;Comrie, Stone andPolinsky 1996, Gagarina 2003;Gor 2007;Gor andChernigovskaya 2004 andGorbačevič 1978, Graudina et al 2001, Janda, Nesset and Baayen 2010Kiebzak-Mandera et al 1997;Krysin 1974;Nesset 2008Nesset , 2010aNesset and Janda 2010;Svistunova 2008; Tkachenko and Chernigovskaya 2010 and references therein). However, there is also a diachronic side to sufix shift.…”

Experimental study of first and second language morphological processing

“…The cross-linguistic data on the processing of verbal morphology in German, Italian, Russian, Norwegian, and Icelandic, languages with a complex conjugational paradigm and often more than one regular verb class, by adults, children, as well as L2 learners, has shed some new light on the disputes (Chernigovskaya & Gor 2000;Gor 2003Gor , 2004Gor & Chernigovskaya 2001, 2003a, 2003b, 2005Clahsen 1999;Matcovich 1998;Orsolini & Marslen-Wilson 1997;Orsolini, Fanari, & Bowles 1998;Ragnasdóttir, Simonsen, & Plunkett 1997;Simonsen 2000). All these studies have found the influence of frequency on the processing of all the verb classes, including the regular default classes, both in children and adults.…”

“…However, these studies do not maintain the distinction between regular and default inflection, which strongly undermines their claims. Research on the processing of Russian verbal morphology by native Russian adults and children, and adult American speakers of Russian as L2, which will be discussed more in detail below, has produced several results incompatible with the categorical distinction between regular and irregular morphological processing (Chernigovskaya & Gor 2000;Gor 2003Gor , 2004Gor & Chernigovskaya 2001, 2003a, 2003b, 2005. Thus, in nonce verb generation, all the groups of subjects generalized several conjugational patterns ranging in regularity; type frequency was one of the determining factors in the choice of the conjugational pattern -high type frequency patterns were generalized to novel verbs more readily; in a LDT, RTs were shorter for high-frequency forms in the conjugational paradigm.…”