Processing of inflected adjectives

Abstract

Processing of inflected Serbian verbs was investigated in two lexical decision experiments. Specifically, the following issues were addressed: a. does the adjectival system contain syntactic functions and meanings, and b. are adjectival gender and case cognitively relevant properties. Each of the above issues could be expressed in terms of alternative equations that generate the amount of information carried by inflected form of an adjective. The informational values were correlated with mean reaction time to inflected adjectival forms. The outcome of the two experiments indicated that number of syntactic functions/meanings is the obligatory term in the equation that generates the amount of information carried by an adjectival inflected form. However, unlike nouns, where the amount information was specified in terms of ratio between a. sum of frequencies of inflected cases encompassed by a given inflected form and b. sum of its functions/ meanings, equation for adjectives includes sum of frequency by number of syntactic functions/meanings ratios for cases encompassed by a given inflected adjectival form. This, on the other hand, suggests that cognitive system when processing inflected adjectives is to some extent sensitive to adjectival case. It was also demonstrated that cognitive system is not sensitive to adjective gender.