Natalia Slioussar

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at National Research University Higher School of Economics

Introduction In this paper, we studied how native (L1) speakers of Russian and speakers of Mandarin Chinese learning Russian as a foreign language (L2) process Russian sentences with different word orders. We compared SVO (canonical) and OVS (non-canonical) orders in isolation and in context. Experiments focusing on the L2 processing of different w...

In this paper, the results of a large web-corpus study on gender of Russian inanimate indeclinable common nouns are presented. In most cases, neuter is assigned to indeclinables as a default. However, morphophonological and semantic analogy may lead to feminine and masculine gender assignment. An extensive variation is observed in the whole group o...

Проявление свойств двух типов синтаксической связи в сложном предложении, сочинения и подчинения, на дискурсивном уровне пока остается малоизученным вопросом. В предыдущих исследованиях было показано, что причинно-следственная связь, кодируемая подчинительными союзами, способствует запоминанию формальных характеристик текста. В нашем исследовании б...

This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university-level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spel...

Although all healthy adults have advanced syntactic processing abilities in their native language, psycholinguistic studies report extensive variation among them. However, very few tests were developed to assess this variation, presumably, because when adult native speakers focus on syntactic processing, not being distracted by other tasks, they us...

The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However,...

The paper explores the influence of discourse structure on text complexity. We assume that certain types of discourse units are easier to read than others, due to their explicit discourse structure, which makes their informational input more accessible. As a data source, we use the dataset from the MECO corpus, which contains eye movement data for...

In the modern world of social media, we constantly read texts that were not subject to professional proof-reading and editing. As a result, we see misspelled words more often than the previous generations. The effects are interesting for several scientific disciplines, including psycholinguistics. Several experiments on different languages have rec...

Our paper focuses on the Russian expression svoj. Many authors argue that it should be divided into two lexemes: a reflexive possessive that must be locally bound and an adjective. However, while some cases are clear, the others became a source of controversy. This problem has never been analyzed in a corpus study. In this paper, we examined a corp...

Many production and comprehension experiments have studied attraction errors in agreement, primarily in number (e.g., “The key to the cabinets were rusty”). Studies on gender agreement attraction are still sparse, especially in comprehension. We present two self-paced reading experiments on Russian focusing on the role of syncretism in this phenome...

Research into second language (L2) reading is an exponentially growing field. Yet, it still has a relatively short supply of comparable, ecologically valid data from readers representing a variety of first languages (L1). This article addresses this need by presenting a new data resource called MECO L2 (Multilingual Eye Movements Corpus), a rich be...

Brain systems dealing with multiple meanings of ambiguous stimuli are relatively well studied, while the processing of non-selected meanings is less investigated in the neurophysiological literature and provokes controversy between existing theories. It is debated whether these meanings are actively suppressed and, if yes, whether suppression chara...

Scientific studies of language behavior need to grapple with a large diversity of languages in the world and, for reading, a further variability in writing systems. Yet, the ability to form meaningful theories of reading is contingent on the availability of cross-linguistic behavioral data. This paper offers new insights into aspects of reading beh...

Modern psycho- and neurolinguistics use standards of precision typical of the natural sciences. As verse scholarship also bases its standards on those of the natural sciences, it can be combined fruitfully with the natural sciences, including neuroscience. This may ultimately allow us to answer the fundamental question of how verse and prose are pr...

The paper presents two experiments which 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 have compared case...

This paper analyzes the SOV order in Russian. Various hypotheses concerning its distribution have been proposed in previous functional and formal studies, but none of them became widely accepted. We tested these hypotheses on the large "Taiga" corpus and found that the main factor that triggers SOV is pronominalization: if the object is pronominal,...

One of the central questions in second language processing studies is whether native (L1) and second language (L2) readers process sentences relying on the same mechanisms or there are qualitative differences. As their proficiency grows, L2 readers become more efficient, but it is difficult to determine whether they develop native-like mechanisms o...

Using written texts elicited from students with different proficiency levels, we studied the acquisition of nominal cases in Russian as a second language. We established the order in which cases were acquired (nominative, locative, accusative, genitive, instrumental, and dative), as well as certain characteristics of their acquisition trajectories....

Dealing with ambiguity, one usually selects one meaning unconsciously and remains unaware of the alternative meanings. The brain systems dealing with multiple meanings of ambiguous stimuli are relatively well studied, while the brain processing of their non-selected meanings is relatively less investigated. The current functional MRI event-related...

It has been acknowledged that the null subject of a converbial clause in Russian is canonically controlled by the Nominative subject of a main clause (that is, Nominative subject control). Non-Nominative control has been considered to be ungrammatical. On the basis of two experiments (an acceptability judgement task and speeded grammaticality judge...

This report describe studies of the functioning of brain structures which are components of the frontotemporal system which is involved in the processes giving rise to speech and the organization of the mental lexicon. The studies address the question of whether it is possible, using functional tomography data, to discriminate the processes generat...

Even if we know how to spell, we often see words misspelled by other people — especially nowadays when we constantly read unedited texts on social media and in personal messages. In this paper, we present two experiments showing that the incidence of orthographic errors reduces the quality of lexical representations in the mental lexicon—even if on...

Various linguistic mechanisms can be used to determine which part of the sentence tells about about already known information and which part contributes new information to the sentence. Such sentence packaging is called information structure (IS). In Russian syntactic (word order alternations) and prosodic (phrasal stress shift) mechanisms are wide...

Various linguistic mechanisms can be used to determine which part of the sentence tells about about already known information and which part contributes new information to the sentence. Such sentence packaging is called information structure (IS). In Russian syntactic (word order alternations) and prosodic (phrasal stress shift) mechanisms are wide...

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 an...

In this article, we present StimulStat – a lexical database for the Russian language in the form of a web application. The database contains more than 52,000 of the most frequent Russian lemmas and more than 1.7 million word forms derived from them. These lemmas and forms are characterized according to more than 70 properties that were demonstrated...

Many experiments have studied attraction errors in number agreement (e.g. ‘The key to the cabinets were rusty’). It has been noted that singular heads with plural dependents (attractors) trigger larger attraction effects than plural heads with singular attractors, and that in languages with morphological case, morphologically ambiguous attractors t...

Lexical access to a word is known to be influenced by the word’s relation to the other words. These words carry information through different channels - inflectional paradigms (a.m.o. Lõo et al., 2017), derivational family size (a.m.o. Moscoso del Prado Martin et al., 2004), semantic neighbourhood (a.m.o. Feldman et al., 2015). Derivational familie...

This paper addresses one of the central problems in mental grammar studies - the problem of modularity in anaphoric processing. Our study is based on Reuland's model "Primitives of binding" arguing that anaphoric relations can be established in three independent language modules: syntax, semantics, and discourse. These modules work sequentially: fr...

In this paper, we look at a paradigm leveling process currently taking place in Russian that affects historical consonant alternations (morphophonemic alternations that arose as a result of historical sound changes in Slavic and Russian specifically). In Standard Russian, these alternations are present in some verb forms (ljubit’ ‘to love’ – ljublj...

Corpus and experimental approaches in linguistics are often seen as in- compatible, and there are very few studies of grammatical phenomena that rely on both of them, without one or the other being subsidiary. In this paper, we would like to show that they are complimentary and can be fruitfully com- bined on the example of Russian phrasal enclitic...

The Minimalist Program is just that, a “program”. It is a challenge for syntacticians to reexamine the constructs of their models and ask what is minimally needed in order to accomplish the essential task of syntax – interfacing between form and meaning. This volume pushes Minimalism to its empirical and theoretical limits, and brings together some...

The Possible Word Constraint, or PWC, is a speech segmentation principle prohibiting to postulate word boundaries if a remaining segment contains only consonants. The PWC was initially formulated for English where all words contain a vowel and claimed to hold universally after being confirmed for various other languages. However, it is crucial to l...

The author of the article has incorrectly provided the grant number in acknowledgement section of the original publication.

The role of orthographic neighbors (e.g. bank—tank) in word processing has been discussed in many experimental studies. However, these studies have been conducted on a limited pool of languages, and many important questions are still unresolved. After creating a lexical database StimulStat that contains various neighborhood parameters for Russian,...

Metaphors and other non-literal expressions are studied in different frameworks, which often offer opposing views on their role in language and thought and their interpretation and usage. Some of these claims can be tested experimentally. In this paper, we present two reading experiments comparing the processing of literal and non-literal expressio...

This paper studies certain aspects of language processing during reading: it describes the role of word length information obtained by parafoveal vision. Which properties of a word are processed parafoveally (that is, before the eyes actually move to it) and how this information is used are among the least understood questions in reading studies. T...

The role of orthographic neighbors (e.g. trail – trial) in word processing has been discussed in many experimental studies. these studies address the problem of visual word recognition, lexical access in the mental lexicon and a number of other topics that are currently under debate in psycholinguistics. However, there are virtually no studies on t...

Parsing in sentence processing is one of the key problems of psycholinguistics. Syntactically ambiguous sentences, which allow for several possible parses, give an opportunity to reveal the factors that guide the choice of the interpretation and thus become an instrument for studying sentence processing. In this paper we present several experiments...

Agreement attraction errors (such as the number error in the example “The key to the cabinets are rusty”) have been the object of many studies in the last 20 years. So far, almost all production experiments and all comprehension experiments looked at binary features (primarily at number in Germanic, Romance, and some other languages, in several cas...

We report two lexical decision experiments analyzing Russian prefixed and unprefixed verbs and deverbal nouns. These experiments show that the summed frequency of direct derivatives influences access time to the base word. We demonstrate that this effect cannot be explained by semantic or phonological similarity and is not due to the fact that deri...

Parsing in sentence processing is one of the key problems of psycholinguistics. Syntactically ambiguous sentences, which allow for several possible parses, give an opportunity to reveal the factors that guide the choice of the interpretation and thus become an instrument for studying sentence processing. In this paper we present several experiments...

Experimental studies conducted by linguists, psychologists and other researchers identified a large list of word properties that play a role for speech production and comprehension. They include lemma and form frequency, word length, the number of syllables, stress pattern, frequency of letters and syllables the word consists of, whether the word h...

Functional connectivity between brain areas involved in the processing of complex language forms remains largely unexplored. Contributing to the debate about neural mechanisms underlying regular and irregular inflectional morphology processing in the mental lexicon, we conducted an fMRI experiment in which participants generated forms from differen...

This paper analyzes word order alternations, stress shifts and intonational contours related to Information Structure (IS). The data come primarily from Russian, a language that is very rich in this respect. I argue that IS-related grammatical phenomena encode relative accessibility (whether A is more or less accessible than B), rather than some ca...

This thesis is dedicated to the study of information structure (IS) dividing information into given/new, salient/backgrounded etc. There is an information structure represented in the discourse mental model and an information structure encoded in the grammar, which indirectly reflects it (as the tense system of the language indirectly reflects our...

The generation of regular and irregular past tense verbs has long been a testing ground for different models of inflection in the mental lexicon. Behavioral studies examined a variety of languages, but neuroimaging studies rely almost exclusively on English and German data. In our fMRI experiment, participants inflected Russian verbs and nouns of d...

The Internet is a unique source of non-standard forms, which gives us a novel opportunity to analyze fine-grained dynamics of language change. We used this opportunity to study the decay of historic consonant alternations in Russian. In standard Russian, these alternations are present in some verb forms and in comparatives (e.g. suxoj 'dry' - sushe...

This paper analyzes movement to the Tense domain in Russian. It demonstrates that Russian verb does not normally leave the vP, and that only internal Nominative arguments can remain in situ, while external ones obligatorily raise to [Spec; TP], as in English. Unlike in English, external subjects can be sentence-final, but this results from addition...

In languages with flexible constituent order (so-called free word order languages), available orders are used to encode given/new distinctions; they therefore differ not only syntactically, but also in their context requirements. In Experiment 1, using a self-paced reading task, we compared Russian S V IO DO (canonical), DO S V IO and DO IO V S con...

Russian allows for low postverbal subjects with transitive verbs without an overt expletive, so the question arises how the EPP is satisfied in Russian. Two answers are available in the literature: first, Russian may belong to the Greek and Spanish group in Alexiadou and Anagnastopoulou's typology (1998); second, several authors, John Bailyn (2003a...

In inflectional paradigms, the invariance of the stem is often compromised by various alternations. This talk discusses several processes currently taking place in colloquial Russian that aim to get rid of such alternations.