Processing of morphological and semantic cues in Russian and German

This study examines the on-line processing of morphological cues to sentenc e interpretation in Russian and German with the goal of evaluating the rela tive impacts of cue availability and cue reliability. Both Russian and Germ an use the cues of word order, animacy, case-marking, and subject-verb agre ement to identify the agent of active transitive sentences. However, the av ailability of the case-marking cue is higher in Russian than in German. Usi ng a picture-choice paradigm, we contrasted case-marking and animacy in Rus sian and German. The reaction times showed larger effects of case-marking i n Russian than in German and effects of animacy in German, but not in Russi an. These results suggest that the higher the availability of a cue, the la rger the processing benefits associated with the presence of this cue and t he smaller the impact of other converging information. A recurrent cascaded backpropagation network was designed to simulate these effects. The networ k succeeded in capturing the essential language differences in the reaction times, thereby illustrating how the statistical properties of cues in a la nguage can affect the time-course of activation of alternative interpretati ons during sentence processing.