The processing of process and result deverbal nominals in Serbian and English

Abstract

Process and result deverbal nominals are two types of nouns derived from related verbs. These two types of deverbal nominals exhibit different behavior in a number of aspects. The aim of this study was to test the differences of process and result deverbal nominals, in both Serbian and English, with respect to their cognitive processing. Two self-paced reading experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 was conducted in Serbian, with target constructions, process and result deverbal nominals (e.g., drhtaj/drhtanje [EN trembling]), embedded in the sentence contexts, whereas Experiment 2 dealt with the equivalent constructions in English. Data were analyzed with the Generalized Additive Mixed Models - GAMMs (Wood, 2006, 2011) measuring reading times (RTs) at the word level (deverbal nouns) and the sentence level (the whole sentence, including the deverbal nominal) in both languages. The final results in general suggested that result deverbal nominals were processed faster than process deverbal nominals. It was assumed that these differences were obtained because process deverbal nominals are syntactically more complex than result deverbal nominals.