Parafoveal processing of inflectional morphology in Russian: A within-word boundary-change paradigm.

The present study examined whether the inflectional morphology on Russian nouns is processed parafoveally in words longer than five characters while the eyes are fixated on the word. A modified boundary-change paradigm was used to examine parafoveal processing of nominal case markings within a currently fixated word n. The results elicited identical preview benefit for both first and second-pass measures on the post boundary and whole word regions. The morphologically related preview benefit (vs. nonword) was observed for first and second-pass measures as early as pre-boundary, post-boundary, and whole word regions. Additionally the morphologically related preview elicited cost (vs. identical) for first-pass measures on the post-boundary region, total time for the whole word, and regressions into the pre-boundary region. The contribution of the study is two-fold. First, this is the first study to use within-word boundary changes to study the parafoveal processing of inflectional morphology in Russian. Second, we provide additional evidence that inflectional morphology can be integrated parafoveally while reading a language with linear concatenative morphology.