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Morphologically Mediated Effect Of Syntactic Diversity
In the mental lexicon words are connected to each other
through various paths. We explore how a word’s
representation might be accessed, depending on its
syntactic properties and shared formal properties with
other members of a morphological family. Morphological
families of verbs in Russian are primarily related through
processes of prefixation and suffixation. Based on the
changes that these two processes introduce to the
derivational paradigm and the base word’s syntactic
distribution, we expect to observe a resultant adjustment
of the lexical access to the family’s stem. We used the
data obtained in two priming studies of morphologically
related verbs in Russian. The results account for a
facilitative effect of the syntactic variability of a stem
verb observed after pre-activation of the suffixed relative,
while that of the prefixed verb showed an inhibitory
influence.