Morphological processing across the lifespan

Most Russian words are multimorphemic: that is, they consist of multiple word parts - morphemes: дом-ик, красн-ый, зеркал-о (cf. English: cat-s, small-er, charm-ing). The mechanisms of processing multimorphemic words are an unresolved question in psycholinguistics. Do we process them as a whole, or do we unconsciously break them into morphemes (that is, perform morphological decomposition)? Recently, Reifegerste et al. (2017) hypothesized that the processing mechanisms may change across the lifespan. As we age, our linguistic experience grows, and so does our exposure to any individual word form. As a result, word form representations in the mental lexicon are strengthened, and we start to rely more on whole-word access rather than morphological decomposition.

In collaboration with Svetlana Alexeeva (St. Petersburg State University) we tested this hypothesis in four experiments in Russian, using four different psycholinguistic methods. In total, we collected the data of 501 participants from three age groups (teenagers, younger adults, older adults). 

Taken together, the studies suggest that morphological processing across age groups is most consistent with the 'dual-route' model (Schreuder, Baayen, 1995). In other words, people of all ages utilize a complex mechanism whereby whole-word access and morphological decomposition run in parallel. Hence, our initial hypothesis about a general age-related shift from morphological decomposition to whole-word access was not confirmed.

However, Experiment 4 (principal investigator: Svetlana Alexeeva) showed that the mechanisms of processing Russian multimorphemic words depend on their frequency. When we access low-frequency items that are not very familiar to us (e.g., 'rowanberr-ies'), we rely on morphological decomposition. For higher-frequency words, we add whole-word access mechanisms. What is important is that age group modulates the frequency threshold at which this shift occurs. For example, a teenager might access the word 'rowanberr-ies' via decomposing it into morphemes, whereas a young adult and, even more so, an older adult might have a more robust representation of this word form and thus process it as a single unit. To conclude, linguistic factors (frequency) and individual factors (age) have a joint influence on how we process multimorphemic words.

Peer-reviewed publications

Savinova E., Malyutina, S. Evidence for dual-route morphological processing across the lifespan: data from Russian noun plurals // Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. 2021. doi:10.1080/23273798.2021.1879182

Conference presentations and published abstracts [in English only]

Experiment 1 (Lexical decision using masked priming with letter transpositions):

1) Alekseeva S., Mikhailov V. (2018). Does COATS Prime COAST? Masked Priming With Transposed-Letter Noun Forms in Russian // Poster presented at the 2nd International Workshop "Neurobiology of Speech and Language", St. Petersburg, Russia, 28 September 2018.

Published abstract:
Alekseeva S., Mikhailov V. (2018). Does COATS Prime COAST? Masked Priming With Transposed-Letter Noun Forms in Russian // In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop «Neurobiology of Speech and Language». St. Petersburg: Skifiya-print. P. 41.


Experiment 2 (Lexical decision using number-dominant nouns):

1) Malyutina S., Savinova E. (2018).  Morphological processing across the lifespan: Evidence from number-dominant nouns // Poster presented at the 11th International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, Ednomton, Canada, 25-28 September 2018.

2) Savinova E., Malyutina S. (2019). Morphological Processing in Healthy Aging: Data from Russian Noun Plurals // Poster presemted at the Aging & Cognition Conference, Zurich, Switzerland, 24-26 April 2019.

3) Savinova E., Malyutina S. (2019). Evidence for Dual-route Morphological Processing Across the Lifespan: Data from Russian Number-Dominant Nouns // Poster presented at the 3rd International Workshop "Neurobiology of Speech and Language", St. Petersburg, Russia, 1-5 June 2019.

Published abstract:
Savinova E., Malyutina S. (2019). Evidence for dual-route morphological processing across the lifespan: Data from Russian number-dominant nouns. (PDF, 1.76 Мб) // In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop «Neurobiology of Speech and Language». St. Petersburg: Skifiya-print. P. 59-60.

Experiment 3 ('Illusory Conjunctions' paradigm):

 
1) Savinova E., Zharikova D., Malyutina S. Morphological processing across the lifespan: Evidence from an illusory conjunctions paradigm // Poster presented at the 2nd International Workshop "Neurobiology of Speech and Language", St. Petersburg, Russia, 28 September 2018.

Published abstract:
Savinova E., Zharikova D., Malyutina S. (2018). Morphological processing across the lifespan: Evidence from an illusory conjunctions paradigm (PDF, 116 Кб) // In.: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop «Neurobiology of Speech and Language». St. Petersburg: Skifiya-print. P. 50.

2) Zharikova D., Malyutina S. The Effect of Case on Morphological Processing: Experimental Evidence from an ‘Illusory Conjunctions’ Paradigm // Poster presented at the 6th Summer Neurolinguistics School "Experimental Research in Less-Studied Languages", Moscow, Russia, 1-3 July 2019.

3) Malyutina S., Zharikova D., Savinova E. The effect of case on morphological processing: Evidence from an ‘illusory conjunctions’ paradigm // Poster presented at The Fifth St. Petersburg Winter Workshop on Experimental Studies of Speech and Language (Night Whites 2019), St. Petersburg, Russia, 16-17 December 2019.


Experiment 4 (Lexical decision manipulating surface and base frequency):

1) Алексеева С. В. Surface and base frequency effects in the processing of Russian noun forms // Talk presented at the International Morphological Processing Conference (MoProc), Tübingen, Germany, 4-7 November 2019. 

Published abstract:
Alexeeva S. (2019). Surface and base frequency effects in the processing of Russian noun forms. // In: International Morphological Processing Conference (MoProc), Book of Abstracts. Tübingen, 2019. P. 11-12.

The project was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project no. 18-312-00101 (2018-2019).