Morphological processing of verbal inflection: Evidence from L2 Russian

The present psycholinguistic research aims at contributing to the debate on mechanisms underlying mental representation and processing of morphologically complex words by studying processing of verbal inflection in L2 and L1 Russian speakers through the implementation of a written elicited-production experiment that tests the conjugation of real and nonce verbs. The research focus is also on examining whether L2 Russian speakers differ from L1 Russian speakers in their morphological generalization mechanisms. For this purpose, a written elicited-production experiment with 42 L1 and 42 L2 advanced speakers of Russian was implemented remotely in online mode, the first production experiment of this kind for Russian. The results revealed that L2 Russian speakers processed verbal inflections differently from L1 Russian speakers both in real and nonce verbs. L2 Russian speakers were affected by the frequency and verb class manipulations more than L1 Russian speakers which denoted the differences in language learning backgrounds, notably in implicit and explicit input frequencies. The results also demonstrated the effect of morphological rules on the processing of real verbs and the impact of the knowledge of probabilities and morphological cues on the processing of nonce verbs. These results thus suggested that the hybrid mechanisms of morphological processing posited by the Rules and Possibilities Model were employed by L2 Russian speakers.