Predicting complex syntactic structure in real time: Processing of negative sentences in Russian.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Russian grammar features a unique "genitive-of-negation" phenomenon where direct objects can take the genitive case under negation.
• This contrasts with the accusative case, commonly licensed by verbs cross-linguistically.
• The role of case marking in anticipating syntactic structures in free-word-order languages remains an active area of research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether case marking in Russian negative sentences is used for anticipating syntactic structure.
• To determine if lexical heads, specifically verbs and negation, can be predicted based on a case-marked noun phrase.
• To ascertain if the genitive-of-negation is an active component of Russian speakers' grammatical knowledge.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: A sentence completion task to confirm the active use of genitive-of-negation.
• Experiments 2 & 3: Reading time experiments manipulating object case (genitive vs. accusative) and linear order.
• Analysis of reading times at negation and verb to assess processing facilitation and predictivity.

Main Results:

• Experiment 1 confirmed that genitive-of-negation is actively used by Russian speakers.
• Experiments 2 & 3 showed shorter reading times for negation and verbs when objects were in the genitive case.
• Experiment 3 indicated that the parser actively predicts verbs and negation based on a preceding genitive-marked object.

Conclusions:

• Case marking in Russian, particularly the genitive-of-negation, plays a crucial role in predictive syntactic processing.
• The parser utilizes case information on preverbal noun phrases to anticipate upcoming lexical heads and negation.
• This mechanism enables incremental structure building in Russian, similar to head-final languages, despite its free-word-order nature.