Kyröläinen, A. 1, 2 , Vainio, S. 3 & Hyönä, J. 3
1 McMaster University
2 Brock University
3 University of Turku
There is considerable evidence that language processing is incremental, involving utilization of linguistic and non-linguistic cues to anticipate upcoming information (Clark, 2013). We report results of a gaze contingent eye-tracking experiment in Finnish-one of the few languages that morphologically marks grammatical aspect on transitive objects rather than on the verb (Huumo, 2010). Accusative case signals perfective aspect and the partitive case imperfective, e.g., Tutkija kloonasi marsu-
a/marsu-n laboratoriossa ?The researcher was cloning/cloned the guinea pig in the laboratory?. This allows us to investigate whether higher-order event knowledge is already pre-activated early in time and at the verb or whether this type of predictive processing requires the support of bottom-up information, i.e., the difference in case marking.
For 150 verbs, aspectual preference was operationalized as surprisal-inverse log probability of the case marking given the verb (Levy, 2008)-extracted from the Finnish Internet Parsebank (Kanerva, Luotolahti, Laippala, & Ginter, 2014). The verbs were embedded in sentences occurring in three conditions: partitive (-A ), accusative (-n ), and pseudo (-r ) with an invisible boundary between the verb and the object.
During reading, when participants? (n = 68) gaze crossed the boundary, the object changed to the preferred case associated with the verb.
Generalized additive mixed-effects models were fitted to the gaze data. An analysis of first fixation duration (FFD) on the verb showed that condition was statistically significant with the preferred case marking facilitating processing and pseudo marking inhibiting. In the second analysis, surprisal emerged as a statistically signficant predictor of FFD with an inhibitory effect. Thus, the results indicate that morphological information can be accessed parafoveally (Hyönä, Yan, & Vainio, 2018) and higher-order syntactic information is pre-activated already early in time at the verb.