Garden-Path Sentences in Russian: Linguistic Factors and Psychophysiological Correlates

Associate Professor of the Faculty of Social Sciences Valeriia Demareva together with her colleague from the Technical University of Braunschweig Julia Yedeleva presented the online talk "Garden-Path Sentences in Russian: Linguistic Factors and Psychophysiological Correlates" at the annual international conference on cognitive architectures for artificial intelligence (BICA*AI 2020). The talk reported on the results of a recent study carried out in the paradigm of self-paced reading and was devoted to studying the peculiarities of reading sentences with ambiguity caused by the syncretism of the case system, resolved by stress in speech in Russian (gOrod-gorodA, etc.). It turned out that such sentences are read differently in the case of inanimate and inanimate nouns, which was analyzed in the context of well-known models of syntactic analysis.

These results were published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. It also turned out that the very situation of uncertainty in the sentence causes a psychophysiological reaction like that of cognitive load. It should be noted that this study was the first in the world to test an experimental design that includes an analysis of the heart rate when reading sentences with ambiguity. The results of this part of the study are currently being prepared for publication in an international journal indexed in the SCOPUS (Q1) database. The continuation of research in this area is planned for 2021, and an application for a Russian Science Foundation grant has been submitted.