Processing of verb tense

Abstract

Processing of Serbian inflected verbs was investigated in two lexical decision experiments. In the first experiment subjects were presented with five forms of future tense, while in the second experiment the same verbs were presented in three forms of present and future tense. The outcome of the first experiment indicates that processing of inflected verb is determined by the amount of information derived from the average probability per congruent personal pronoun of a particular verb form. This implies that the cognitive system is not sensitive to verb person per se, nor to the gender of congruent personal pronoun. Results of the second experiment show that for verb forms of different tenses, presented in the same experiment, the amount of information has to be additionally modulated by tense probability. Such an outcome speaks in favor of cognitive relevance of verb tense.