The Relationship Between Saccade Landing Position and Number of Suffixes.

As part of my work, I investigate one of the factors of saccade programming - the position of the initial fixation. This parameter refers to the early stage of linguistic information processing during reading and means the position in the word where the reader's view has moved after fixing on the previous word. The position of the first fixation can be influenced by high and low level factors. The first are the length and frequency of the word, the frequency of the first trigram. High-level factors (for example, the morphological structure of the word), involve the mechanisms of language processing. The purpose of my research is to find out whether the morphological composition of the word influences the initial landing position for the Russian language. This will help to understand how early in the process of reading the Russian reader can perceive the morphological information about the word and whether it can process it in the parafoveal area, i.e. before his eyes fixed on the word. For this purpose, 48 pairs of sentences were compiled, differing in one critical word. Critical words in a pair of sentences differed in their morphological structure (monomorphemic, consisting of one root base, and multimorphic, consisting of two affixes). The statistical measurements carried out after collecting the experimental data showed that, regardless of the distribution factor (according to the subjects or the word length), the morphological structure of the word does not affect the initial landing position. In all cases, the p-value was greater than 0.05, which made it impossible to accept the H1 hypothesis about the existence of a statistically significant difference in initial landing position between mono- and multimorphic words. Thus, the morphological composition of the word does not affect the position of the initial fixation for the Russian language, which means that the Russian reader does not extract the morphological information about the word from the parafoveal area during reading and, accordingly, does not use it for identification and morphological processing.