Suffix interference in Russian

Abstract

Abstract. The phenomenon of "suffix interference" has been used as evidence for a distinction between inflectional and derivational processes (e.g. Pinker & Prince, 1988;Pinker, 1999;Pinker & Ullman, 2002). Yet much of the work on affix priming exists in English, a morphologically poor language, and suffix interference appears inconsistently in cross-linguistic data. The greater reliance on morphological complexity in Russian, and its use of an infinitival suffix and aspectual affixes that may bridge the distinction between traditional definitions of inflectional and derivational word forms, call into question how generalizable the original findings on suffix interference may be for morphologically-complex languages. Investigating these questions, this paper provides unexpected findings: suffix interference is absent in Russian, inflectional suffixes reveal significantly more robust priming effects, and the infinitival suffix is best considered a special case of affix priming, failing to pattern with either inflectional or derivational suffixes. Thus, Russian appears to defy the assumption that inflections are "stripped" during morphological parsing; instead, verbal inflections prove the greatest facilitators of morphological priming. A linear mixed effects model indicates these effects cannot be explained by frequency alone.

Asymmetries in the processing of affixed words in Bengali

“…In experiment 3 (prefixedprefixed), we found that prefixed words reliably primed other morphologically related prefixed words. In experiment 4 (suffixed-suffixed), the findings also suggest that morphologically related suffixed items prime each other readily in Bengali, contrary to the lack of priming found for suffixed words in Marslen-Wilson et al 1994, Feldman & Soltano 1999, Gonnerman & Andersen 2000, Reid & Marslen-Wilson 2000, Feldman & Larabee 2001, and Comstock 2018 In comparing the degree of priming between prefixed-prefixed and suffixed-suffixed configurations, however, we found a substantial difference. While the prefixedprefixed configuration exhibited a priming effect size of 84 ms, the suffixed word pairs exhibited a priming effect size of only 21 ms.…”