ИСТИНА

Among the current issues in morphology is the subjective representation of so-called "morphemic seams" (junctions between word roots and affixes, including prefixes and flections). One of the ways to probe into these representations is to manipulate perceptual characteristics of visually presented words and word parts, measuring response parameters for various presentation conditions. There is a number of methods in visual psychophysics which might be useful here. In one of our experiments, we used simultaneity judgements on asynchronously presented word parts (Pechenkova, Sinitsyna, 2009) to address two issues regarding "morphemic seams": first, whether words are stored in the mental lexicon in all possible forms (Manelis, Tharp, 1977), or they are constructed from roots and affixes stored separately (McKay, 1978), or both options are implemented in the mental lexicon architecture (Taft, Nguyen-Hoan, 2010); second, whether there is a difference in subjective representation of derivational and inflectional morphology. To do so, we compared perception of words split at the morphemic junction and across the root (Vasilyeva et al., 2013). In the other experiment (Vasilyeva, Falikman, Fedorova, submitted), we combined a standard lexical decision task with color segregation of the word stimuli, the method proved to be an analogue to spatial segregation in visual attention tasks (Baylis, Driver, 1992). Although far from the clear understanding of the representation of Russian morphology in the mental lexicon, we were able to get a bit closer to the understanding of how the morphological structure of a word might be implemented in its architecture.