Simultaneous effects of inflectional paradigms and classes in processing of Serbian verbs

Abstract

In this paper we show that the processing of inflected verb forms is simultaneously influenced by the distributional properties of their inflectional paradigm (all the inflected forms of the given verb) and also by their inflectional class (all the verbs that conjugate in the same manner). Thus, we generalize a finding that was previously observed with nouns. We demonstrate that a divergence of the frequency distribution within inflectional paradigm from the frequency distribution within inflectional class (operationalized as Relative entropy between the two frequency distributions) is detrimental to processing. We present the results of a visual lexical decision experiment and the results of a simulation that was ran in the Naive Discriminative Reader, a simple computational model based on basic learning principles. We show that Relative entropy between an inflectional paradigm and an inflectional class predicts both empirically observed and simulated processing latencies. By doing so, we add to the body of research that investigates processing effects of information theory based descriptions of language. We also demonstrate that the effect of Relative entropy on the processing of morphology can arise as a consequence of the principles of discriminative learning in a system that maps input cues to outcomes, with no specification of morphology per se.