Description
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The pseudo partner experiment was developed to investigate the mental representation of formal properties of Russian aspectual pairs. Participants were confronted with 25 existing Russian verbs and 25 invented pseudo verbs of different morphemic types (base form, prefixed form, po-prefixed form, prefixed and suffixed form, nu-suffixed form), e.g. *zurat’. Each stimulus was presented visually on a computer screen. Participants were asked to 1) read the word or pseudo word aloud 2) determine the verb’s aspectual subcategory (pf. or ipf.), in case of the pseudo verbs based on their linguistic intuition and 3) naming the stimulus’ aspectual partner, respectively, in case of the pseudo verbs forming an appropriate partner by manipulating the stimulus. Both reactions to words and pseudo words were analyzed, but given the fact that aspectual pairs for existing Russian verbs are certain, reactions to pseudo words are much more interesting and therefore in the focus of this investigation. The participants’ aspectual classifications of the stimuli and their pseudo partner proposals were analyzed regarding their appropriateness. What is appropriate, of course, differs among morphemic types, so for each morphemic type specific hypotheses were formulated, based on a corpus analysis of 500 Russian verbs. Furthermore, partner proposals were examined with respect to the type of manipulation, e.g. taking a prefix off, adding a prefix, adding a suffix et cetera. |