Do morphological features affect the cognitive processing of deverbal nominals in Serbian?

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine whether different morphological characteristics of Serbian deverbal nominals affect their lexical processing. According to morphological differences, there are three subtypes of the process and result deverbal nominals in Serbian: (i) result nominals end with the zero suffix, while process nominals end with the deverbal suffix -nje (e.g., žubor/žuborenje [eng. burble]); (ii) result nominals differ from process nominals in the presence of the -va infix (e.g., rešenje/rešavanje [eng. solution]); (iii) process nominals end with the deverbal suffix -nje, while result nominals end with other derivational suffixes (e.g., rotiranje/rotacija [eng. rotation]). The final results of three self- paced reading experiments suggest that different morphological features do not affect the processing of deverbal nominals, which strongly supports a-morphous approach to the morpho-lexical processing, as well as the distributed morphology perspective in the field of theoretical linguistics.