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Trans-paradigmatic syncretism in case form processing in Russian
The paper presents two experiments that studied processing of different case forms of Russian nouns in a sentential context. Target sentences contained a preposition requiring a particular case, and in different experimental conditions, we used a noun in the correct case or in several other cases after it. Many previous studies compared case forms in isolation, both in Russian and in other languages, but our study revealed that different factors played a role in a sentence: grammaticality and trans-paradigmatic syncretism of case affixes. The former finding was expected, while the latter was novel. Trans-paradigmatic syncretism is discussed in several theoretical approaches to Russian noun morphology, and most models assume that in many cases, it is purely accidental. However, it has never been demonstrated to play a role in processing. Therefore, our findings are relevant both for theoretical morphology and for several important psycholinguistic debates, including the question how word forms and inflectional affixes are represented in the mental lexicon.